🔗 Share this article

A stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own barrier was breached, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about commemorating their history. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

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

Historical Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the same inn, visiting the same church and enrolling their young ones to the very same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole village, establishing their command in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were required to display ID, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “good new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life creating it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much structure they wished to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to escape in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of observation towers are preserved alongside a collection of displays depicting the most dramatic events in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents required special permission to care for their crops; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but not the two, in case they attempted to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of double the number individuals (well over 300) died attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is probable to