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A stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own wall was opened, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started memorialising their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

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

Historical Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the very same tavern, visiting the identical religious building and sending their kids to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a period, residents could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to present identification, although all knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “back at you” to a West German resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life creating it. Locals were asked early on about how much structure they wanted to keep. They selected a section on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a villager was able to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained together with a set of tableaux showing the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to look after their fields; the spouse could use the combine harvester but not both, lest they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but more than two times more persons (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see every year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and large parking lot – is likely to