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A brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division 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. Speaking to the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, visiting the very same religious building and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their command in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present identification, even though all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

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 barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a western local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section barrier they desired to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to get away in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the border was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained alongside a series of tableaux depicting the most significant events in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not both, lest they tried to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but over twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) died seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between two political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They did not backed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited every year, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and sizable car park – is expected to