🔗 Share this article

A creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical inn, going to the same religious building and sending their young ones to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, residents could continue to cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to display identification, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his professional career building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they desired to keep. They opted for a section on the western fringe, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Installations

Two observation towers are conserved alongside a series of displays showing the most significant events in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They did not backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, store, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is probable to