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An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents began documenting their heritage. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Telling the residents who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the very same tavern, going to the very same church and enrolling their children to the same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they seized the whole community, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to present ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his working life building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wanted to keep. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of exhibits depicting the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to care for their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never the two, lest they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but more than twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited each year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, movie theater and sizable car park – is probable to