German Village Divided by Iron Curtain

The Berlin Wall was known around the world — but Berlin wasn’t the only place split in two.

This less famous village with just 50 residents was also divided for 38 years.

Bits of the Iron Curtain still stand in tiny Mödlareuth twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — in an open-air museum.

Half of this farming community — which is around 300 kilometres south of Berlin — is in the state of Bavaria, which was in West Germany.

And the other half lies in Thuringia, which was in East Germany — says museum director Robert Lebegern.

[Robert Lebegern, Director of the Museum in Mödlareuth]:
„We had a really strange situation here — crowds of visitors and streams of tourists on the West German side of Mödlareuth. On the East German side there was a 500-metre restricted zone, and daily life was heavily regulated.“

Instead of armed border guards — the section of wall that’s left is now patrolled by busloads of tourists, searching for the remains of East German communism.

Around 60,000 visitors make the trek to the isolated village each year.

The villagers of Mödlareuth decided to leave some of the wall standing as a reminder of the division of Germany.

Local resident Hannie Spielvogel still remembers what it was like.

[Hannie Spielvogel, Museum Visitor]:
„It was divided. They were almost brothers and sisters, and they weren’t allowed to visit each other. It was terrible.“

The Berlin Wall fell on the 9th of November 1989.

But Mödlareuth was finally reunited some seven months later.

Manfred Zeh, who’s lived in the village all his life, says it was a special moment.

[Manfred Zeh, Mödlareuth Resident]:
„It was wonderful. It was lovely to see school classmates and everyone who used to live in Mödlareuth, and be able to talk to them again. It was great.“

Although neighbors can now pop across the road for coffee, traces of the old division persist.

Mödlareuth still lies in two German states, with two postcodes and two different school systems.

But the watchtowers and barbed wire fences are now nothing more than relics of a former era.

(NTDTV)