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An brook so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was breached, and before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people started documenting their past. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely ready. Telling the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same tavern, going to the same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a period, villagers could still cross over, though as controls increased they were forced to show ID, although everyone understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career creating it. Locals were asked early on about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

2 guard towers are preserved in addition to a collection of displays showing the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they tried to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but more than double the number people (well over 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Current Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and large parking lot – is likely to