🔗 Share this article

An creek so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers began documenting their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the very same inn, visiting the same religious building and enrolling their children to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the whole community, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were required to show identification, although each person knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi watch list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career creating it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section barrier they wanted to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the western fringe, adjacent to where a local resident managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are conserved in addition to a series of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to care for their crops; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they tried to flee. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but in excess of double the number people (well over 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They neither backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 visited every year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big car park – is likely to