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An creek so low you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their heritage. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the manner of the locals drinking in the same inn, attending the very same religious building and enrolling their kids to the same school.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the whole village, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were required to present ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with mines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could still see each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how much wall they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Installations

2 guard towers are conserved together with a collection of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and big car park – is probable to