🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance 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 partition. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people set about documenting their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which tore families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the residents drinking in the same inn, attending the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the complete village, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time developing it. Locals were consulted early on about how much structure they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of observation towers are conserved together with a series of exhibits illustrating the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we walk, the director lists the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to look after their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but never the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many individuals (more than 300) died attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. Approximately 15k came to see every year, optical devices in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Modern Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to