🔗 Share this article

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their heritage. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals socializing in the identical inn, attending the very same church and sending their young ones to the very same school.

After the War Split

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the complete village, creating their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, near where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a series of exhibits showing the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but over twice as many people (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not supported the socialist government nor resisted it, the director states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to visit every year, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and large car park – is expected to