🔗 Share this article

A stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people set about memorialising their history. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the very same inn, attending the same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same learning center.

After the War Division

Then came the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the entire village, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back back over the creek. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to display identification, although all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his working life creating it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They chose a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained alongside a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed particular approval to care for their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never the two, in case they attempted to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see each year, viewing tools in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and big vehicle area – is expected to