🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own wall was opened, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of local people began documenting their past. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the very same place of worship and sending their children to the very same school.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the whole village, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a time, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to present identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They selected a section on the western edge, near where a villager was able to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but more than twice as many individuals (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director informs me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of site of interest. About fifteen thousand visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and large car park – is expected to