🔗 Share this article

An creek so low you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their history. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely finished. Addressing the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which ripped households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the residents drinking in the very same pub, going to the same religious building and sending their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russians put up timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the complete hamlet, creating their command in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a time, villagers could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to display ID, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and shouting were banned. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a significant portion of his professional career building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a series of displays depicting the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we walk, the director lists the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more people (well over 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and large parking lot – is expected to