A stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.
Several months after their own division was opened, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their history. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely finished. Addressing the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”
“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which ripped relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”
Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the identical tavern, going to the very same place of worship and placing their young ones to the same school.
Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the whole village, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a while, residents could continue to hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to return at after dark.
After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who said her “good new year”.
I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the west fringe, close to where a villager succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was significantly fortified.
Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of exhibits depicting the most significant dates in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents required special permission to care for their crops; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.
The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than twice as many people (more than 300) were killed seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.
For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.
Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.
The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to
Milan is een ervaren opticien met een passie voor visuele technologie en klantgerichtheid.
