🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about documenting their past. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the residents drinking in the same pub, going to the very same church and placing their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Then came the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they took over the complete village, setting up their command in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to retreat across the creek. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to show identification, even though everyone knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could continue to observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. One woman was put on a Stasi watch list for replying “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his professional career building it. Residents were polled early on about how much barrier they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager was able to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are maintained together with a set of exhibits showing the most impactful events in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but over two times more people (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director tells me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About 15k came to visit every year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is likely to