🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you barely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own wall was opened, and prior to their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents started documenting their history. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the very same pub, visiting the identical church and placing their young ones to the same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to show identity papers, although all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his working life building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section barrier they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the western fringe, adjacent to where a villager was able to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the border was significantly fortified.

Maintained Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of exhibits illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the agricultural equipment but never the two, for fear that they attempted to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but more than twice as many persons (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to visit each year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large vehicle area – is likely to