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An brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started commemorating their history. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, attending the same church and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the World War II. The moment they came, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they took over the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his professional career building it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, close to where a villager succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

Two guard towers are preserved alongside a set of displays depicting the most impactful events in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern details the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required particular approval to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Context

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but over double the number people (more than 300) died trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. About 15k came to see each year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Current Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and large parking lot – is probable to