🔗 Share this article

A brook so low you barely got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades. By an accident of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents gathering in the very same pub, visiting the identical place of worship and sending their children to the very same school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were obliged to present identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his professional career developing it. Villagers were asked early on about how how long a section wall they wanted to maintain. They opted for a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the boundary was substantially fortified.

Preserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a collection of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen details the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but not both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but over two times more individuals (more than 300) died attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and large parking lot – is expected to