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A brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people set about commemorating their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the very same tavern, attending the same place of worship and sending their kids to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Separation

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians erected wood stakes by the stream. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to withdraw across the stream. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were required to show identity papers, although everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were prohibited. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they wanted to maintain. They opted for a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are conserved alongside a set of displays illustrating the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required special permission to look after their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they sought to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more persons (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to