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An creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for over four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about commemorating their past. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Telling the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the very same inn, attending the very same religious building and sending their kids to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete community, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, locals could continue to hop over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to show identification, although each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section wall they wished to preserve. They chose a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a series of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but not the two, in case they attempted to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but more than twice as many individuals (more than 300) were killed attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited each year, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and large car park – is expected to