🔗 Share this article

A creek so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for over four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a group of residents began documenting their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely ready. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the very same pub, attending the same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat across the creek. For a while, residents could continue to cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were required to present identification, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own was able to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most significant events in the community’s past. As we walk, Lebergen details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could work the combine harvester but not the pair, in case they tried to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of double the number individuals (more than 300) died attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They did not supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. About fifteen thousand visited annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is probable to