Former Iron Curtain oddity now a tourist hotspot
MOEDLAREUTH, Germany, July xx (Reuters) - A tiny village of 50 residents straddling the former German-German border and nicknamed “Little Berlin” has preserved its own 100-meter section of the Iron Curtain — for tourists.
For more than 38 years Moedlareuth belonged to two different countries and ideological systems. The 2.5 meter (eight foot) high Wall, similar to the famous Berlin Wall, remains a fixture in the village center even 20 years after Communism collapsed.
The farming hamlet that lies 300 kilometers south of Berlin has become a prime destination for tourists searching for remnants of the Communist era when East and West Germany were divided.
“Visitors can come here to get a real glimpse of what it was like to live here with the Wall running through the middle of the village,” said Robert Lebegern, director of the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum in the heart of Moedlareuth.
For four decades the villagers of Moedlareuth were divided by the Iron Curtain. Half of the village was in the old German kingdom of Bavaria, the other part lay in the eastern state of Thuringia. It was one bizarre aspect of the country’s division.
On the surface, traces of the division still persist: there are two different post codes, two dialing codes and two different school systems.
Those living in the former East greet each other with “Guten Tag” (good day) while their neighbors from the heavily Roman Catholic state of Bavaria tend to say “Gruess Gott!”.
Nowadays snap happy tourists have replaced the old border guard surveillance. Over 60,000 visitors came to Moedlareuth in 2008 and the museum expects equally high numbers this year as the 20th anniversary of the Wall falling approaches.
In addition to the original segment of Wall — which looks like a compact version of its big brother in Berlin — there are border posts, watch towers, barbed-wire fencing and warning signs.
“It feels very frozen in time,” said Huw Diprose, 20, a student of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who was on a hike of the former Iron Curtain.
“I was barely a year old when the wall fell. I wanted to come here to get into the mindset of what it was like back then.”
A MICROCOSM
East Germany started to fence itself off from the West in 1952 — a border that for centuries had been administrative then divided families, friends and neighbors. East Germany built the Berlin Wall in 1961 and at the same time in Moedlareuth.
Even neighborly greetings were outlawed.
“We could wave to our friends on the other side of the wall, but they weren’t allowed to acknowledge us back,” said Karin Mergner, a 62-year-old farmer living in western Moedlareuth.
“But they did so in their own special way — whether they wiped their brow or touched their ear,” she added.
Kurt Goller, 74, who resided in the East German territory, described the consequences of breaking the ban.
“I once risked a secretive wave to my uncle Max but I was seen by a guard,” he said. “He told me if I did it again I’d be thrown out of my house — they would deem me unfit to live in the border security zone.”
School children, curious tourists and political leaders all flocked to Bavarian Moedlareuth. Then U.S. Vice President George Bush gave a speech in 1983, echoing John F. Kennedy’s 1963 address in West Berlin, stating, “Ich bin ein Moedlareuther!”
But for those living deep inside the East German border zone — a five kilometer wide high security area — access was restricted. When the Wall finally cracked open in 1989, eastern Moedlareuth was overwhelmed by the sudden media attention.
“The Japanese journalists were the most brazen,” Goller said, echoing a general sentiment of distrust in the village toward journalists. “They even looked in the fridge, expecting us to be starving to death.”
RESIDENTS RE-UNITED
It took a while for the small town to reunite. Four weeks after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, a direct border opening was finally made in Moedlareuth on December 9 1989 but everyone was still required to present their passports.
It wasn’t until six months later, on June 17, that people were allowed to cross the border in “Little Berlin” freely, after the mayor on the Bavarian side, Arnold Friedrich, knocked down larger chunks of the Wall with a digger.
“It was a great moment of celebration,” said Lebegern, director of the museum. “But afterwards some East Germans complained that he had damaged East German property,” he added with a laugh.
Unlike in Berlin, where much of the 160-km long Berlin Wall was quickly torn down, the Moedlareuth residents had the foresight to preserve part of the wall as a memorial — and tourist attraction.
“I think it’s right that they’ve kept a bit, so that the young people see what it was really like,” said Elli Seidl, a west Moedlareuth resident. “People come from Berlin and say there’s not really much left to show where the wall stood.”
East-West reunification may have been beset by problems elsewhere, but it is hard to find the prejudice about “lazy easterners” and “arrogant westerners” in Moedlareuth.
“The village has more or less grown together over the last 20 years,” said Robert Schricker, a 32-year-old resident.
“You read in the newspapers that we’re always fighting and arguing but that’s rubbish,” said Seidl. “We’re always doing things together — there are joint Easter egg hunts and parties. There’s no animosity.”
