🔗 Share this article

An stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades. By an accident of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people set about commemorating their past. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same tavern, going to the very same religious building and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the entire village, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to show identification, although all understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could continue to see each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. One woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how much structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a section on the western fringe, near where a villager succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a series of displays depicting the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen details the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers had to obtain special permission to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, lest they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Context

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but over double the number persons (exceeding 300) died trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and sizable car park – is likely to