🔗 Share this article

An creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own division was opened, and before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents started documenting their past. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Addressing the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents gathering in the identical tavern, visiting the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russians installed wood stakes by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the entire community, creating their command in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, locals could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to present identification, although all knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side waving and calling out were prohibited. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life building it. Residents were asked early on about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They selected a section on the west edge, near where a local resident was able to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Installations

Two guard towers are preserved alongside a collection of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the village’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the spouse could work the combine harvester but never both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. About 15k came to visit every year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to