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A brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their history. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same tavern, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the same school.

After the War Division

Then came the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the whole village, setting up their command in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back across the brook. For a time, residents could continue to cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to display identification, even though everyone understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a West German villager who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his professional career developing it. Residents were consulted early on about how much structure they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, near where a local resident managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the border was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are conserved together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, the director lists the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but never the two, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than twice as many people (more than 300) died attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to living in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They neither backed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of site of interest. About fifteen thousand visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is probable to