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A brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers began memorialising their past. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the very same pub, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Division

Then came the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display identity papers, even though everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career creating it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how much wall they wanted to keep. They opted for a section on the western fringe, near where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Conserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of tableaux depicting the most dramatic moments in the village’s history. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed particular approval to tend to their fields; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but never the two, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not supported the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, movie theater and sizable car park – is probable to