🔗 Share this article

A brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people began commemorating their past. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely finished. Telling the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, attending the identical religious building and placing their young ones to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole village, creating their command in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, locals could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to display identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian edge, close to where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Conserved Buildings

2 guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers required special permission to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Background

The border between West Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to visit every year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and big vehicle area – is expected to