An creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.
Several months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started documenting their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Addressing the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”
“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”
Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, attending the identical church and sending their young ones to the identical school.
Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the complete hamlet, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the brook. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to present identification, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to go back at night.
Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “prosperous new year”.
I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section wall they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.
2 observation towers are conserved in addition to a series of exhibits showing the most significant events in the community’s chronicle. As we move, the director lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required special permission to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but never both, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.
The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but in excess of twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.
For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit every year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.
Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.
The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to
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