🔗 Share this article

An stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents started commemorating their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals drinking in the same inn, attending the very same place of worship and placing their children to the identical school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they seized the whole community, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to display identity papers, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a western resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I heard stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much wall they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a villager was able to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux depicting the most impactful events in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers needed particular approval to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more people (well over 300) were killed trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They did not supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Modern Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big car park – is probable to