🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents started commemorating their history. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely finished. Addressing the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals gathering in the very same pub, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians erected wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they seized the entire hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display ID, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life developing it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to preserve. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of watchtowers are conserved together with a collection of displays depicting the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their produce; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, in case they attempted to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but over two times more individuals (exceeding 300) died attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15k visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Modern Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big car park – is likely to