🔗 Share this article

An stream so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their history. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the identical pub, attending the identical place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the whole community, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to retreat back over the stream. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were obliged to present ID, even though each person knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the east side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his professional career creating it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to maintain. They chose a stretch on the western fringe, close to where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Installations

Two observation towers are conserved together with a set of displays depicting the most significant dates in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of double the number people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to visit annually, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and large parking lot – is expected to