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A stream so low you barely got your feet wet separated a village for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the same inn, attending the same church and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole community, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to display identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were forbidden. One woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his working life developing it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of barrier they desired to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian edge, near where one of their own succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

Two guard towers are conserved in addition to a series of displays showing the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number persons (well over 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit each year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is likely to