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A stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the identical pub, going to the same religious building and sending their young ones to the very same learning center.

After the War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to display identity papers, although all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western local who said her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted early on about how what length of structure they wanted to preserve. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Conserved Structures

Two observation towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux depicting the most significant dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but never both, in case they sought to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but in excess of two times more persons (more than 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Current Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is expected to