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A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the residents drinking in the identical tavern, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the same school.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete community, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identification, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his working life developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they desired to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west edge, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Installations

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most impactful events in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to care for their produce; the husband or wife could work the agricultural equipment but not the pair, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but in excess of double the number persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is probable to