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A brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, fields 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 East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started documenting their heritage. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents drinking in the same pub, attending the identical church and placing their young ones to the same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were required to present ID, even though everyone understood who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were polled early on about how much barrier they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where a local resident managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Structures

Two watchtowers are conserved together with a set of displays depicting the most impactful events in the community’s history. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, in case they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more individuals (more than 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to