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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began documenting their heritage. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Telling the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

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

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same tavern, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces convinced them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still view each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life building it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the west fringe, near where a villager succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic events in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not the two, in case they sought to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Background

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many people (well over 300) were killed trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Approximately 15,000 came to see each year, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

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

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and large parking lot – is likely to