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An brook so low you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people began memorialising their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity never stood in the way of the residents drinking in the same tavern, attending the identical place of worship and sending their young ones to the same school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could continue to jump across, though as controls increased they were obliged to display identification, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Installations

2 watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of exhibits depicting the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to tend to their produce; the partner could use the combine harvester but never the two, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The border between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand came to visit annually, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big car park – is expected to