🔗 Share this article

A stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, 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 nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their heritage. The work is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants drinking in the identical inn, going to the identical religious building and sending their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the whole community, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, locals could still jump across, though as restrictions increased they were required to display ID, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his working life developing it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They chose a section on the western edge, close to where a local resident succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux depicting the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, the director details the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain special permission to look after their crops; the spouse could work the combine harvester but not the two, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but over two times more individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They did not supported the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of destination. About 15,000 came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to