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A brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers set about commemorating their heritage. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Addressing the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk did not stand in the way of the residents gathering in the very same tavern, attending the identical place of worship and placing their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Separation

Then came the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were forced to display ID, even though all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could continue to view each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to maintain. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian edge, close to where a local resident was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, the director details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Farmers needed particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they tried to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (more than 300) died seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Roughly 15k visited every year, binoculars in hand, 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 reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is probable to