A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.
Months after their own barrier was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their heritage. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely prepared. Speaking to the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”
“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
Right from its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the path of the locals gathering in the very same pub, visiting the identical religious building and placing their kids to the same educational institution.
Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians installed wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole village, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls increased they were obliged to present ID, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to come back at evening.
After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who wished her “happy new year”.
I was told accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his professional career creating it. Residents were consulted early on about how much structure they desired to maintain. They selected a portion on the western perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.
2 watchtowers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but not both, for fear that they attempted to flee. Soldiers stood watch.
The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but in excess of twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.
Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director explains.
For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. About fifteen thousand visited each year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.
Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.
The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable car park – is probable to
