🔗 Share this article

A brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a settlement for over four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents began memorialising their heritage. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal split, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the inhabitants drinking in the identical tavern, going to the identical place of worship and sending their young ones to the very same school.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the entire village, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls increased they were obliged to show identification, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I heard narratives including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how much barrier they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits showing the most significant events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the rules: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but over double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and large car park – is expected to