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A creek so low you barely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of residents began memorialising their past. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely finished. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the same tavern, attending the identical church and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the entire community, creating their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a while, locals could continue to cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The locals could continue to view each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a western resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked early on about how much barrier they desired to keep. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the border was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most significant events in the community’s history. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed specific authorization to look after their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they attempted to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but over two times more individuals (more than 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. About 15k visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is likely to