🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own division was breached, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their history. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Speaking to the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the very same pub, attending the same church and placing their children to the identical learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire village, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were required to show identity papers, even though everyone knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. One woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I heard narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to preserve. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to care for their fields; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The border between West Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more persons (more than 300) died trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is expected to