An brook so low you barely got your feet wet separated a community for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Mini Berlin.
Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about documenting their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”
“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”
Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity never stood in the manner of the locals drinking in the same pub, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same school.
Then came the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, residents could continue to cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to present identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.
Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was added to a Stasi watch list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “good new year”.
I was told stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wished to preserve. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was heavily reinforced.
2 watchtowers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux illustrating the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents needed special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they attempted to flee. Military personnel kept guard.
The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.
Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They did not backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director clarifies.
For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.
Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.
The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to
Elena Vance is a digital strategist with over a decade of experience in UK business consulting, specializing in technology-driven growth solutions.