🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers began documenting their past. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

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

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the identical inn, visiting the same religious building and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were required to present identification, although everyone understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a western local who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life building it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of wall they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian edge, close to where one of their own succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved in addition to a set of displays depicting the most impactful events in the village’s past. As we move, the director lists the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they tried to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) were killed attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They did not supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to see each year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to