🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers started memorialising their past. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the villagers who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the same inn, going to the same place of worship and sending their kids to the very same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the whole village, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted early on about how much barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the western fringe, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Structures

Two guard towers are maintained alongside a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but in excess of twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit every year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

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

Current Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and sizable vehicle area – is expected to