🔗 Share this article

An stream so low you hardly got your feet wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about documenting their history. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Addressing the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Historical Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the same pub, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the entire hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the creek. For a while, residents could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were obliged to show ID, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his working life creating it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved together with a series of displays showing the most dramatic events in the community’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, in case they tried to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see every year, optical devices in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Modern Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big car park – is likely to