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An creek so low you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked 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 opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about commemorating their history. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the very same tavern, going to the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians installed wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the entire village, creating their control center in a building on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

It was related to me accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how much structure they wished to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian edge, near where a villager was able to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they sought to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but over double the number people (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to