🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their past. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the identical pub, attending the same church and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Russians erected wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back across the stream. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as controls increased they were forced to display ID, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could continue to see each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his working life building it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They opted for a section on the western edge, near where one of their own was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are preserved alongside a set of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not the two, in case they sought to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but over double the number people (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 visited annually, binoculars in hand, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and sizable car park – is probable to