🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents set about memorialising their past. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Addressing the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the very same pub, visiting the identical church and sending their young ones to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they came, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete village, setting up their command in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to present ID, despite the fact that all was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western perimeter, close to where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 observation towers are conserved in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed particular approval to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could work the agricultural equipment but not both, for fear that they attempted to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (more than 300) died trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see every year, viewing tools in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Current Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to