🔗 Share this article

An stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical inn, visiting the identical religious building and placing their kids to the same learning center.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to retreat across the stream. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to show identity papers, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to see each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were banned. A female resident was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a western villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his professional career creating it. Villagers were asked early on about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits illustrating the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is likely to