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An stream so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers set about memorialising their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely ready. Addressing the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel division, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, attending the same church and sending their young ones to the identical school.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians put up wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the complete hamlet, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were obliged to show ID, even though each person knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. One woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Farmers required special permission to look after their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but more than two times more persons (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the grey zone between 2 political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is probable to