🔗 Share this article

An creek so shallow you barely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their history. The work is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Speaking to the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the very same pub, going to the identical place of worship and placing their kids to the identical learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, establishing their command in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the brook. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a western villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to preserve. They chose a section on the western perimeter, near where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the border was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

2 observation towers are conserved alongside a set of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but never both, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but more than two times more people (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They did not backed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. About 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is likely to