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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising 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 set about commemorating their past. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same inn, attending the very same church and placing their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, residents could continue to jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were required to show ID, although everyone understood who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they desired to maintain. They opted for a portion on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Structures

Two observation towers are conserved together with a series of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but never the pair, lest they tried to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but over twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is probable to