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A creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart 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 fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the locals gathering in the very same tavern, attending the very same place of worship and sending their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to present ID, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a western resident who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his working life creating it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wanted to preserve. They selected a stretch on the western fringe, close to where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of exhibits showing the most impactful dates in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to care for their produce; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but more than twice as many people (well over 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They did not backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see each year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and large car park – is expected to