A village in Germany divided by a wall!

There is a small river in Modellarut Village that has played an important role in history: from the cold war to the modern border! The small farming community of Modellarut, located just between Berlin and Munich, in the German countryside, has a population of 50 and has only one restaurant. But it draws tens of thousands of visitors every year.

Of course the reason is clear. Among the 18 houses and farms in the village is a 100-meter-long white concrete wall that was once part of the border between East and West Germany.

The German inner border, physically separated from the famous Berlin Wall, was about 1,400 kilometers long and separated from East and West Germany in 1949, when the Soviets founded East Germany, and until 1989, when the strongholds The borders were gradually removed, they were in place. Modellarut was precisely on this border, at that time part of this quiet village in the socialist east and the other part in the western capitalist.

This concrete slit is now part of the Modellarot Museum, and items such as a watchtower, a metal fence, the restoration of a highly reinforced barrier, and other artifacts are next to the museum. The restaurant we mentioned was reopened in 2002 and is called “Zoom Grenzganger” meaning “border crossing”. It is also known as “Little Berlin”.

Today, instead of armed guards, armed tourists walk around the village on camera, and although visitors and locals can easily move from one village to the other without paying attention to old warning signs, they are still crossing a modern-day border: the border. Between the two federal states of Bavaria and Thuringia.

Governments’ decision to keep a 100-meter wall in the village continued long after the end of the Cold War. Of course, except for the remnants of a shattered past of tourists who come to see them and the wall, everyday life in Modellarut is back to normal.

While one-day travelers find it difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the boundary, the boundary has been marked by small differences between the two sides of the village. For example, postal codes, car documents, and phone codes are different. They have two separate mayors. Some public holidays and holidays are different. Children in each part of the village go to different schools.

If you want to understand the difference between the two parts of the village better, one way is to listen to the greetings of good people. Thuringians living in East Germany are used to saying “Gothen Tag” (daytime) which is a standard German greeting, while Bayerns say “Groot Goetz” (which literally means “God bless you”), a phrase most commonly used in You hear South German (and Austrian). Also the accent of the two sides of the village is slightly different. These dialect and dialect differences still remain in Modellarot, though as the village is merged, they are slightly more integrated. For example, now all the villagers have a Christmas tree and a shared waterfall. It will also celebrate the 30th anniversary of the demise of the border and the failure of the wall this year.