🔗 Share this article

A creek so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Months after their own wall was opened, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about memorialising their history. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely ready. Telling the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals drinking in the very same inn, visiting the very same religious building and placing their kids to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the stream. For a while, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show ID, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were prohibited. One woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life developing it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section wall they wished to maintain. They opted for a section on the western fringe, near where one of their own managed to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are maintained together with a series of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s history. As we move, the director enumerates the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About 15k came to visit each year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big vehicle area – is expected to