An brook so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.
A few months after their own barrier was opened, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their past. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”
“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”
Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents gathering in the very same pub, attending the identical religious building and sending their young ones to the same learning center.
Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the whole hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a house on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, residents could still cross over, though as controls increased they were forced to show identification, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.
Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “back at you” to a western local who said her “good new year”.
It was related to me stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a portion on the west perimeter, near where a local resident succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the border was significantly fortified.
Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of displays illustrating the most dramatic events in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel kept guard.
The border between West Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) died trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.
Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director explains.
For visitors, however, the village became a kind of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.
Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.
The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big vehicle area – is likely to
Rashid Al-Mansoori is a tech journalist with over a decade of experience covering innovations and digital transformations in the Middle East.
