🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a settlement for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the very same inn, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat across the creek. For a while, locals could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, even though each person knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I heard narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the west edge, near where one of their own was able to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of tableaux showing the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their crops; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but not the two, lest they sought to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to see annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and large vehicle area – is likely to