In a German Village, West Is Still on the ‘Other Side’ : Reunification: In ‘Little Berlin,’ neighbors still regard each other at a distance. Some don’t speak.

Otto Fischer sits in his upstairs window and peers through his binoculars. There is not much to see.

Ducklings paddle across the pond, a farmer tinkers with his tractor, a few workers spackle the memorial stretch of the concrete wall that once divided this village into East and West Germany.

Gone are the armed guards who once would have arrested Fischer for waving to his neighbors or calling hello to the workers on the other side of the wall.

But even now, Fischer is content merely to gaze through the binoculars he has relied on for half of his 81 years to view “the other side” of Moedlareuth, the side filled with relatives and friends he was forbidden to visit, people who enjoyed a freedom that he could share only through his binoculars.

While everything has changed, Fischer still stays in his window, hungry to see but afraid to touch, keeping life at binocular-range. It is not just the forlorn habit of a lonely old man; it is the wary instinct of a lonely new world.

Binoculars still rest on many windowsills in Moedlareuth, and 18 months after the formidable border dividing this hamlet disappeared, the villagers still regard each other at a distance, silently, over walls they can no longer see.

“It’s not just between East and West, the walls that are still inside us,” Fischer explained. “The strongest walls are between East and East. There are neighbors who don’t speak to each other because of all that happened before.”

Even more perplexing is what is happening now.

Moedlareuth--population 27 easterners, 25 westerners--is a microcosm of Germany’s new angst : the psychological failure of unification. It is proof that even problems that are small enough to see and close enough to grasp are being confronted.

The division of Moedlareuth goes back centuries, to 1524, when the border between the states of Thuringia and Bavaria bisected the farming village. But despite the quirks of cartographers, Moedlareuth remained essentially a single community, sharing one schoolhouse, alternating mayors and attending the same church.

After World War II, the village was occupied first by the Americans, then by the Soviets. When Germany was split, the land was carved up along state lines. Thuringia fell into the eastern part, Bavaria into the west.

“They built the border up gradually,” said Arndt Schaffner, a photojournalist from nearby Muenchberg who spent years documenting the division of Moedlareuth.

First, there was a ditch. Then, from 1952 to 1958, a wooden fence. The Bavarians had to show passes to work their fields on the Thuringian side, but people could still sneak back and forth.

In 1958, the Communist authorities put up barbed wire. Three years later, as the Berlin Wall was being built, they added a second row of wire. When a storm knocked down the wood posts, they came with the cement.

By May, 1966, a concrete wall 850 yards long cut through the heart of Moedlareuth, through the green meadows and thick woods that surrounded the village. Later there would be land mines in the forest, attack dogs and shrapnel-spraying booby-traps.

“The people got used to it being built piece by piece,” Schaffner said, “and so the walls within were built too. Now we must dismantle them the same way--slowly, piece by piece.”

With that idea in mind, Schaffner embarked last year on what at first seemed like a straightforward project to confront Moedlareuth’s past and secure its shaky future: He wanted to build a museum.

Moedlareuth already was famous as a “Little Berlin.” Every year, it attracted tour buses with thousands of visitors. It was a favorite photo opportunity for politicians too. As vice president, George Bush briefly viewed the wall in a blizzard. The easterners used to watch all the excitement in their binoculars.

The German-German Museum would painstakingly show how the border was fortified and patrolled and try to analyze why. A guard tower would remain standing, as would a stretch of the wall. Tourism would revitalize the village and save the eastern side from total economic collapse.

“A museum can’t bring the two German peoples together, because you can’t do that without discussion,” Schaffner conceded. “But maybe this can provide a theme to bring them together, like Holocaust museums do for the visitors who pass through them.”

Even before the two Germanys united last Oct. 3, Schaffner began assembling the pieces of his dream. In his blue van, he drove from army post to army post in what was still East Germany, begging and buying anything he could from the border troops.

“We have uniforms, old weapons, teaching materials for border guards, even a troop transport,” he said.

Among his key sources was a 25-year-old lieutenant who found herself fascinated and horrified by the role she had played on this bloodstained stage.

“I have run up against these walls,” said Brigitte Hamann, speaking of barriers both literal and figurative. “I have to live with my conscience now and my past. I have to make something of it. I want to help the next generation understand and not forget what happened.”

Since the united German army does not accept women, Hamann became jobless as soon as the countries merged. She was offered retraining as a tax adviser but wasn’t interested. She had spent three of her four years with the border guards in officers school, learning exactly what made up the world’s deadliest frontier and why it was so important to defend it.

Then East Germany’s Communist regime was toppled in a peaceful grass-roots revolution and Hamann was given a desk job at her barracks in Plauen.

“I’ve always been interested in history, but I was denied a chance to study it because a teacher I didn’t get along with blocked my chances of going to college,” she said. That was when she entered the army.

Waiting for her inevitable discharge, Hamann began helping Schaffner collect documents, photographs and bigger prizes for the planned museum. Once, she even rerouted a box of uniforms and decorations packed up for the Army Museum in Dresden. While still in uniform, she visited Moedlareuth with Schaffner.

When work began on the information kiosk and two picnic tables at the museum site, right where the wall once stood, Hamann was out there every day in her overalls, painting or hammering without pay.

Occasionally she would notice someone in a window, watching her through binoculars.

Gisela Richter’s twinkling eyes and friendly smile harden when she sees the young woman working down the hill at the museum site. The Richters’ old house stands in the shadow of the guard tower. They have reluctantly accepted that it must stay, along with a section of the wall, as a reminder. But the presence of an ex-guard, even one who never patrolled Moedlareuth, is an affront.

“She’s not wanted here,” Richter said, and the subject is closed. The 51-year-old grandmother prefers to bring out the scrapbooks showing the joyous reunification of the village she was born in.

“The borders fell Nov. 9, 1989, but there was no opening in Moedlareuth and we soon found out there were no plans to make this a crossing,” Richter recalled.

Unlike Berliners, the people of Moedlareuth did not storm their wall. They kept waiting for official permission.

“Somewhere, there was still a fear inside us,” Richter said.

Visiting each other was possible, but only by driving to the major crossing at Hof, half an hour away. When a month had passed and Moedlareuth still remained walled-off, the villagers held a silent candlelight vigil one night.

The next day, a western road-building firm showed up with heavy machinery and bashed through the wall. Although East German border guards protested, they were powerless to stop it. A western mutt named Bubi was the first through the hole. That Christmas, for the first time in 40 years, Moedlareuth had one community Christmas tree instead of two.

“There was a big New Year’s Eve party that year, and we all celebrated together,” recalled Karin Mergner, who married into western Moedlareuth 25 years ago.

At first, the two sides embraced their newfound freedom. Max Goller braved the bitter cold and shuffled over to the eastern side to see his older brother’s house for the first time in four decades. He marveled at Kurt Goller’s handiwork in renovating the kitchen over the years. Max, 83, had watched through his binoculars every morning to see Kurt, now 86, pick up his milk on the porch across the way. Neither had dared to wave.

“We got permission for Kurt to visit me since he was a pensioner,” Max said, “but I was never allowed to go over there.”

On his occasional visits, Kurt would have to get a ride to Plauen, take a train to Hof, then a bus to Moedlareuth. It took over four hours to make the trip across the street.

Max still keeps his binoculars on the windowsill.

“I can see everything with them!” he boasts.

Karin Mergner was encouraged by those first weeks of unity. The easterners came to the Mergners’ small dairy farm to marvel at the stalls and the modern equipment.

“We visited just about every family over there,” Mergner said, “and everybody talked about the old days.”

But almost imperceptibly, the euphoria wore off and “the invitations stopped coming,” she said.

“I thought it would be easier, but it’s simply not so,” she added. “It’s not that they’re introverted. They just have a totally other--how should I say it? I don’t know. . . . It’s not unfriendly, really, it’s just going to take a lot of understanding on both sides. I don’t think there will be a true togetherness in this generation.”

There are differences between “over here and over there,” she remarked, noting that some of her new eastern neighbors are not as “industrious” as the Bavarians. She wishes that they would plant more flowers and tidy up their yards.

“It’s not a question of money,” she added.

Last New Year’s, she said with disappointment but without surprise, “everyone sat alone at home.”

In Thuringia, the villagers still farm for a collective, just as they did under the socialist system. They can’t afford their own equipment or stock. Many, though only in their 50s, say they are too old to start over.

The few younger people have gotten blue-collar jobs in nearby Hof, a former West German town. Martina Gessner, the Richters’ married daughter, works there in a butcher shop, along with her husband, Udo.

Sometimes westerners make obscene gestures as they pass the Gessners’ eastern-made car, a Trabant, on the way to work. Even the common language seems alien, divided into Bavarian and Thuringer dialects.

“I have to be looking at my boss to understand him,” said Martina Gessner.

Harder to understand are the prejudices on either side.

“The westerners think we’re all lazy and that we all spied for the secret police,” said Gessner, who is a young mother of two. The accusation of laziness is especially irksome. She said she hears cars driving through the village as early as 3:30 a.m. as commuters head westward for their jobs.

She grew up hearing that the westerners were the enemy of the people. When American troops went on maneuvers on the other side of the wall, young Martina would see tanks rolling over the hills and run to hide.

“Helicopters would fly overhead, and we had to go inside in case they were filming us,” she recalled.

As a teen-ager, she began riding her bike every day past the guard tower and flirting with the young soldier stationed up there. She brought him coffee and cakes. She eventually married him. Her parents do not mention this when they speak with such contempt for Brigitte Hamann.

“It was different,” Gessner insisted. “My husband was drafted into the army and assigned to the border troops. He had to. She (Hamann) wanted to.”

That difference is one likely to haunt eastern Moedlareuth for years to come. The villagers shun a reclusive neighbor who worked as a policeman, and they gossip about who might have been paid informants for the secret police.

Otto Fischer used to wait for his western relatives from Hof to come stand on the hill overlooking Moedlareuth, at a spot where he could see them with his binoculars.

“They came every two weeks,” he said. “They could wave to me, but I couldn’t wave back. My granddaughter on this side was 9 years old before the western relatives saw her. My son just went with her and stood by the fence, past that plum tree, where the wall ran out. No one said anything. It lasted three or four minutes.

“The policeman was in his garden, and he saw me in the window. He ran back inside, put on his uniform and threatened to turn me in.”

Now that the threat is gone, and the ex-policeman remains, Fischer does not confront him.

“I will never forgive him for that. Never!” he declared. He never speaks to the man, but he still looks at him with his binoculars.

There are no children left in western Moedlareuth, and just four in the eastern half. Only policemen and border officers were allowed to move into eastern Moedlareuth after the wall went up.

The western children moved away when they grew up and no one new came to replace them--the wall somehow made even the open side seem closed.

A few families who once lived right on the borderline were forcibly relocated in the 1960s, but no one has returned to reclaim their land or rebuild. One family of five escaped to the West through a barn window after telling the waiting police that they had to feed their pigs before leaving.

The eastern collective farms are doomed in a free-market system. Gisela Richter admits that most easterners don’t even want the milk anymore because their cows were fed too much silage--and the western milk tastes better. There are no shops or pubs or other businesses on either side of the village, which still has separate mayors because it straddles two states.

“The inner walls still stand because the economic division between East and West is still great,” said Herbert Hammerschmidt, mayor of eastern Moedlareuth. “The farm collective won’t last long. The museum offers hope, though, and we can restructure ourselves for tourism.

“Of course, many people on this side say they have been confronted long enough with this wall and don’t want to have to deal with it anymore,” he added. “But we have to begin somewhere.”

Bavaria has already agreed to put up nearly half of the projected $1.8 million needed to build the museum, and Arndt Schaffner is certain he can raise the rest of the funds.

There are small, almost unnoticed signs of integration here, such as the truck from an eastern bakery that delivers bread to both sides three days a week. And when the information kiosk was finished recently at the museum site, Karin Mergner was there to sell grilled sausages--”Authentic Thuringers” the sign announced.

Schaffner had tried to find an easterner to run the sausage concession and share the profits, but no one, not even the handful of unemployed, expressed interest.

“They don’t get it--that when I want to earn money, I must work for it,” he sputtered with rare exasperation.

At the community meetings to discuss the museum project, Hamann showed up, willing to answer questions about her past, hoping a frank encounter would clear the air.

“No one said anything,” she recalled. “They wait until I leave to complain about me.”

As one of Germany’s growing number of unemployed, she has the option of signing on with a company willing to train her if the government keeps paying her unemployment benefits. She had hoped to do that with the museum. The letter rejecting her application politely explained that her presence in Moedlareuth “offends the sensibilities of the townspeople.”

The animosity, absent on the Bavarian side of Moedlareuth, has not discouraged her. She still dreams of working in the finished museum, to talk about everything that happened, to “make it a living history.”

On a sunny afternoon, she does not care about the binoculars trained on her, and she does not notice the irony of applying mortar to the memorial section of the wall.

“It has to be reinforced or it will fall,” she said.