🔗 Share this article

An stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers began memorialising their past. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

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

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical inn, going to the identical church and placing their children to the identical school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the brook. For a year they took over the complete village, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display ID, although all was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the east side waving and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a West German villager who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his professional career developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, near where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Preserved Structures

2 observation towers are maintained together with a collection of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the spouse could work the combine harvester but never both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is expected to