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A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers began memorialising their history. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the same inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their young ones to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the whole village, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were required to present identity papers, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling hills, but on the east side signaling and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were consulted early on about how much structure they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the western edge, adjacent to where one of their own succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to look after their crops; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Context

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. About 15k visited each year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is expected to