🔗 Share this article

An stream so low you scarcely got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their history. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the very same tavern, visiting the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the whole village, setting up their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, locals could continue to jump across, though as restrictions increased they were required to show identification, although all was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side waving and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was put on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but over twice as many people (more than 300) died trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. About 15,000 came to see each year, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is likely to