🔗 Share this article

A stream so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers began commemorating their history. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

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

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the same pub, going to the identical church and enrolling their kids to the same school.

Following WWII Division

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the complete community, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with mines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I heard stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how much structure they desired to maintain. They selected a section on the west perimeter, near where a local resident was able to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to care for their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but never both, in case they tried to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but more than double the number persons (well over 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of destination. About 15,000 came to see each year, optical devices in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and sizable vehicle area – is probable to