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An creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents began memorialising their history. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

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

Bygone Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical inn, attending the same place of worship and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the complete hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to show identification, although each person was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could continue to see each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German villager who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how much barrier they wished to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian edge, close to where a villager was able to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the border was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Installations

2 guard towers are maintained alongside a collection of displays depicting the most dramatic events in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number people (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and big car park – is likely to