🔗 Share this article

A stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their past. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, going to the identical church and sending their children to the same school.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the whole community, creating their command in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back across the creek. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to show identity papers, although all was aware who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side waving and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his professional career developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wished to keep. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic events in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could use the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they attempted to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Background

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) died seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big car park – is likely to