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A creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of villagers set about documenting their history. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely finished. Speaking to the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the way of the residents gathering in the same inn, attending the identical church and placing their children to the identical school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians put up timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they seized the whole village, creating their command in a building on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were forced to display identity papers, despite the fact that each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were forbidden. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I heard stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked early on about how what length of wall they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

2 watchtowers are preserved together with a series of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they attempted to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but more than double the number people (well over 300) died seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director tells me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 visited each year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and large car park – is likely to