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A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their past. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Addressing the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the very same tavern, going to the identical church and placing their children to the very same educational institution.

After the War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the entire hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to withdraw across the creek. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as controls increased they were required to present identification, even though each person was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian local who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They chose a section on the western edge, close to where one of their own managed to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s history. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but not both, lest they tried to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They neither backed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Current Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and sizable car park – is probable to