🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Addressing the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

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

Historical Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the identical pub, visiting the same church and enrolling their kids to the identical learning center.

After the War Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were forced to show ID, although each person knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still see each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of displays showing the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, in case they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but over double the number people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is probable to