An creek so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.
Several months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents started documenting their heritage. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”
Even at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the very same inn, going to the same church and placing their children to the very same learning center.
Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the complete village, setting up their command in a house on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.
Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was put on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.
I heard accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how much wall they wished to keep. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to escape in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the border was substantially strengthened.
Two observation towers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required particular approval to tend to their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but never both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.
The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern states.
For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.
Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.
The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to
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