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A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their past. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely finished. Speaking to the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the path of the residents socializing in the identical pub, attending the very same religious building and sending their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the brook. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were required to display ID, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a western local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to preserve. They selected a stretch on the west edge, close to where one of their own succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, the director details the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain special permission to look after their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never both, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. the director informs me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k visited every year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and big car park – is likely to