🔗 Share this article

An creek so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the residents drinking in the same tavern, attending the same place of worship and sending their children to the very same school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they seized the complete community, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to retreat back over the brook. For a period, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls tightened they were required to show ID, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could continue to see each other by climbing hills, but on the east side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Development

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to preserve. They opted for a section on the west edge, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Installations

Two watchtowers are conserved in addition to a collection of exhibits showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their crops; the spouse could work the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number people (exceeding 300) died attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to see every year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and large car park – is probable to