🔗 Share this article

An brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people began memorialising their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals drinking in the identical pub, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the complete hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as controls increased they were obliged to show identification, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a West German local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his professional career creating it. Villagers were asked early on about how how long a section barrier they wished to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was heavily fortified.

Conserved Buildings

2 observation towers are conserved together with a series of displays showing the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s history. As we move, the director lists the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never both, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but more than two times more individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to visit every year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and large car park – is expected to