Monday 9 December 2019

little berlin

One month to the day after the Berlin Wall fell and the borders opened, a small village north of Hof on the frontier of Bavaria and Thüringen called Mödlareuth am Tannbach, a thirty centimeter wide brook that first demarcated the boundaries of the preceding polities of the Kingdom of Bayern and the Principality (Fürstentum) of Reuß-Gera after the Napoleonic Wars, prized a passageway through the wall dividing their town—absent gates or checkpoints—so neighbours could finally be reunited. A hundred meter span of wall has been retained as part of an open-air museum. Echoing Kennedy’s speech, during a visit in 1983, then vice-president George HW Bush proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Mödlareuther.”