🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the residents gathering in the identical inn, attending the very same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. The moment they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete community, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to retreat across the creek. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to display identification, although all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They selected a section on the west fringe, near where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Background

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to