A creek so low you barely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.
Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their past. The work is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into aliens.”
“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the very same tavern, going to the very same religious building and sending their children to the identical learning center.
Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the brook. For a year they occupied the complete community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a time, locals could continue to cross over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to show identification, even though everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.
After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “good new year”.
It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were asked early on about how much structure they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident was able to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the border was significantly fortified.
Two guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the community’s past. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to tend to their produce; the partner could use the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards kept guard.
The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) were killed trying to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. the director informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.
The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.
For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. About fifteen thousand came to visit each year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.
25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, led to new interest.
The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to
Elena Hartwell is a multidisciplinary artist and educator passionate about fostering creative communities in London.