🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents began commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Telling the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal split, which pulled households asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the very same pub, going to the same religious building and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a time, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to show ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his professional career developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much barrier they wanted to maintain. They opted for a section on the west edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a collection of displays showing the most impactful events in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director enumerates the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to