🔗 Share this article

An creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet split a village for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about commemorating their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled households into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the same inn, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the same school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they seized the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the stream. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as controls increased they were required to present identification, although all understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were forbidden. One woman was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a western local who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his working life creating it. Residents were consulted early on about how much barrier they wished to keep. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the border was significantly fortified.

Preserved Installations

2 observation towers are conserved alongside a series of displays showing the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) died trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not backed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Current Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to