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A stream so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a village for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own division was breached, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a group of residents set about memorialising their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the very same church and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the entire community, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the creek. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled early on about how much wall they wished to preserve. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian edge, close to where a local resident was able to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Maintained Buildings

2 guard towers are preserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic events in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their fields; the partner could use the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number people (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. About fifteen thousand visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to