🔗 Share this article

A brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was breached, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the identical pub, attending the very same church and placing their children to the identical school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw back over the stream. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were required to show ID, although everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to preserve. They chose a section on the west edge, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of displays showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, the director details the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers required special permission to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but not both, lest they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number people (well over 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They did not supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. Approximately 15k came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Present-Day Changes

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