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A creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people started documenting their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for giving all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, attending the same place of worship and placing their kids to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they took over the entire hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display identity papers, although all understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was put on a Stasi watch list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a stretch on the west perimeter, near where a local resident managed to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

Two observation towers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen details the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers required particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but never both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Context

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (exceeding 300) died seeking to cross it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited each year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is likely to