🔗 Share this article

An creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a settlement for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers started documenting their past. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, going to the same place of worship and sending their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Then came the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians installed wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the complete hamlet, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a time, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display ID, even though all was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were prohibited. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I heard accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life creating it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the western edge, close to where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Installations

Two observation towers are conserved together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, the director details the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, in case they tried to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but more than double the number people (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They neither supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

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

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is probable to