🔗 Share this article

A stream so low you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents began documenting their heritage. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Telling the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents socializing in the very same tavern, visiting the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they occupied the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wished to maintain. They selected a portion on the western edge, near where one of their own managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a series of displays depicting the most significant events in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen details the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Context

The border between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not backed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Approximately 15k visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and large parking lot – is probable to