🔗 Share this article

An stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Months after their own barrier was opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their history. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal split, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents drinking in the identical inn, going to the identical religious building and sending their kids to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the creek. For a year they took over the complete hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back across the stream. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the western edge, near where a villager was able to escape in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Structures

2 guard towers are preserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the partner could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they sought to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but more than twice as many persons (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, the director explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to see every year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and large car park – is expected to