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A stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started documenting their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, attending the identical church and sending their children to the same learning center.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a while, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to present identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a western local who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his professional career developing it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to maintain. They selected a section on the west perimeter, near where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two watchtowers are maintained in addition to a series of displays depicting the most impactful dates in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but never both, lest they attempted to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Village Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is likely to