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An brook so low you hardly got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a collection of local people started documenting their past. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Historical Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the very same pub, going to the very same church and sending their young ones to the same school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they came, the Russians erected wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and observation points. The locals could continue to view each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much wall they wished to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, near where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

2 watchtowers are maintained alongside a set of displays depicting the most dramatic moments in the village’s past. As we move, Lebergen details the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to care for their fields; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Modern Evolutions

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