🔗 Share this article

A stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Addressing the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals socializing in the very same tavern, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their children to the identical school.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the whole community, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the brook. For a time, locals could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display identity papers, although all understood who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling hills, but on the east side waving and shouting were prohibited. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his professional career developing it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wanted to preserve. They selected a portion on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

2 guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of displays showing the most impactful events in the village’s history. As we move, the director details the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their crops; the partner could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Context

The border between West Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but over double the number persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of destination. About fifteen thousand came to visit every year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and large parking lot – is probable to