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An stream so low you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a group of local people began documenting their history. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the very same inn, visiting the very same church and sending their children to the same learning center.

After the War Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they took over the complete community, establishing their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw across the stream. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to present ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police watch list for replying “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

It was related to me accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to preserve. They opted for a portion on the west edge, near where a villager was able to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained together with a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed special permission to tend to their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but not both, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but more than twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is likely to