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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their history. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Telling the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the same pub, attending the very same religious building and sending their children to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to withdraw back over the brook. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to display identification, even though all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Residents were consulted early on about how how long a section wall they wished to preserve. They opted for a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Buildings

2 watchtowers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but over double the number persons (well over 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k came to visit each year, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and large vehicle area – is probable to