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An creek so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own division was opened, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their history. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the locals socializing in the same tavern, visiting the very same church and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians put up wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the stream. For a while, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to show ID, even though each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could continue to view each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for replying “likewise” to a western local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a stretch on the western edge, close to where a local resident was able to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to look after their produce; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but not the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but over twice as many people (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see each year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable car park – is likely to