An creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.
Months after their own division was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”
“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”
Right from its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the residents socializing in the very same pub, going to the very same church and placing their kids to the very same learning center.
Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians erected wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they seized the entire hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back back over the creek. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to display ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.
Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could continue to view each other by ascending hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.
I heard stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, close to where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was substantially strengthened.
2 watchtowers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their fields; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers were on duty.
The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but in excess of twice as many individuals (well over 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.
The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.
For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.
25 years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.
The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is likely to
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