🔗 Share this article

An creek so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents began memorialising their past. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Telling the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel division, which tore families apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents socializing in the same inn, attending the very same place of worship and sending their children to the same school.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they seized the entire community, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to display identification, although everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a West German villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life developing it. Locals were consulted early on about how much structure they wished to keep. They selected a section on the western fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

Two observation towers are maintained in addition to a collection of tableaux illustrating the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to care for their fields; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but over double the number people (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They neither backed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited each year, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to