An creek so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.
Months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people set about memorialising their past. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”
“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which tore families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”
Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the identical pub, attending the very same place of worship and sending their children to the identical educational institution.
Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the entire community, establishing their command in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were forced to display identity papers, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to return at after dark.
Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were forbidden. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.
I heard stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his professional career developing it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the western perimeter, close to where one of their own managed to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was heavily fortified.
2 observation towers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen details the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to care for their fields; the partner could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they attempted to flee. Armed guards kept guard.
The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of double the number people (well over 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.
The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.
For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to visit annually, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.
Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.
The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is expected to
Lena Hoffmann is a seasoned journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that matter, specializing in German current affairs and digital media trends.
