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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their history. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Addressing the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the same inn, attending the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the whole community, creating their headquarters in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back across the brook. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, even though all understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They opted for a section on the western edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers required special permission to care for their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but not the two, in case they attempted to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, movie theater and big parking lot – is expected to