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A brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers began documenting their past. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals gathering in the very same tavern, attending the identical religious building and placing their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Then came the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the complete village, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were forced to present ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a western resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section wall they wanted to preserve. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved alongside a series of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed special permission to look after their crops; the partner could use the harvesting machine but not both, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but over twice as many individuals (well over 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to