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An stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers began documenting their past. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the path of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, attending the identical church and sending their children to the same learning center.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, creating their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw back over the brook. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were required to show ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a West German local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section structure they desired to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two observation towers are maintained alongside a set of displays depicting the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but never both, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but over double the number persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15k visited each year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is expected to