🔗 Share this article

An stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their history. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the entire village, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to retreat back over the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to present identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wished to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most significant dates in the hamlet’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but never both, in case they attempted to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Current Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable car park – is likely to