An creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.
Several months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about documenting their history. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Speaking to the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
“You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”
Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the very same tavern, visiting the same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the identical educational institution.
Then came the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, locals could continue to cross over, though as controls became stricter they were required to show identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to come back at night.
Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a West German local who wished her “prosperous new year”.
I heard narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was significantly strengthened.
A pair of watchtowers are conserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most impactful dates in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but never both, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.
The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but more than two times more individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.
For visitors, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited each year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.
Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.
The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to
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