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A brook so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents set about memorialising their past. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which pulled families apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled families apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, going to the very same church and placing their children to the very same learning center.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the entire community, setting up their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to show ID, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a western local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of wall they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident was able to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to tend to their produce; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but over twice as many people (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to see each year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to