A brook so low you barely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.
A few months after their own division was breached, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely finished. Telling the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”
“You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”
Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning 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 way of the locals socializing in the very same pub, attending the identical religious building and placing their children to the identical learning center.
Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete village, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions increased they were required to show identification, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to come back at evening.
Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.
I was told stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how much barrier they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly strengthened.
2 guard towers are conserved together with a collection of exhibits illustrating the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to care for their crops; the partner could use the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they attempted to flee. Military personnel kept guard.
The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but more than double the number individuals (more than 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.
For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.
Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to new attention.
The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and sizable car park – is expected to
A seasoned journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that matter in the Czech Republic and beyond.
