🔗 Share this article

A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people set about memorialising their history. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Telling the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, visiting the identical church and sending their children to the same educational institution.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the whole hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were forced to display ID, although all was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section wall they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Installations

Two observation towers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux depicting the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their crops; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they sought to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than twice as many individuals (more than 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, optical devices in possession, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and large car park – is expected to