🔗 Share this article

A creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents began memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, attending the identical religious building and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole community, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to show identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted early on about how what length of barrier they desired to preserve. They opted for a section on the west fringe, close to where a local resident succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the border was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits depicting the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director lists the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not both, in case they sought to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but over two times more people (exceeding 300) died seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and large vehicle area – is likely to