🔗 Share this article

A brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about memorialising their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents gathering in the same tavern, going to the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Division

Then came the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to display ID, although all understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his professional career developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much structure they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the west perimeter, near where a villager was able to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Installations

Two guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number individuals (more than 300) died seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. the director tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. About 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is expected to