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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a village for over four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their heritage. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Addressing the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals gathering in the same inn, going to the same religious building and sending their children to the identical educational institution.

After the War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the entire community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the stream. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were obliged to display ID, although everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were prohibited. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for replying “same to you” to a western villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how much structure they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager managed to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 guard towers are conserved in addition to a series of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director enumerates the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to care for their crops; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but over double the number people (more than 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15k visited annually, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Modern Changes

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and big car park – is probable to