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A brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began commemorating their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the residents who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents gathering in the identical inn, going to the same religious building and placing their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw across the stream. For a while, locals could continue to jump across, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by ascending hills, but on the east side signaling and yelling were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his working life developing it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section structure they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the western fringe, near where a local resident succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen lists the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their crops; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k visited every year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is expected to