A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.
A few months after their own wall was opened, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”
Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents socializing in the identical inn, going to the same church and enrolling their children to the identical learning center.
Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they took over the whole community, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to pull back across the stream. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to show ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to return at night.
Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian local who wished her “happy new year”.
I heard stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his working life building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how much wall they wished to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was heavily fortified.
A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never both, lest they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.
The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts failed.
Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They did not supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.
For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.
Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.
The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is probable to
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