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An creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was breached, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers started commemorating their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the residents drinking in the same inn, going to the very same religious building and sending their kids to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a year they took over the entire village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a time, locals could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life building it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to maintain. They chose a section on the western edge, near where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux illustrating the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director lists the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but never the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but over double the number persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is expected to