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An creek so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers set about documenting their heritage. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely ready. Speaking to the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore relatives into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the same pub, visiting the very same religious building and placing their kids to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted early on about how much structure they wished to keep. They chose a stretch on the west perimeter, near where a local resident was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Installations

2 watchtowers are conserved in addition to a series of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not both, for fear that they sought to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but more than twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of destination. About fifteen thousand came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to