🔗 Share this article

A creek so shallow you barely got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of residents began memorialising their past. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals gathering in the same pub, visiting the identical church and placing their kids to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, locals could continue to jump across, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his professional career building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they desired to keep. They chose a section on the western edge, close to where a villager succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

2 observation towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but never the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of destination. Approximately 15,000 visited every year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and large parking lot – is probable to