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A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their country had become one in 1990, a collection of residents set about documenting their heritage. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the same inn, visiting the very same church and placing their kids to the identical school.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the complete community, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to present identity papers, even though everyone understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side waving and yelling were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his professional career building it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to keep. They opted for a section on the west edge, close to where a villager managed to escape in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Preserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the community’s history. As we move, the director enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain special permission to tend to their crops; the partner could operate the combine harvester but not the two, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but more than double the number persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly 15k visited each year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is expected to