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An creek so low you barely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Months after their own division was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of local people started documenting their past. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the very same tavern, attending the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to retreat back over the stream. For a time, villagers could continue to hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to display identification, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to see each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were consulted early on about how what length of structure they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never the two, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (more than 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see each year, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and large car park – is likely to