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A brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers started documenting their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the residents who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the residents drinking in the same tavern, visiting the very same church and sending their children to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a time, villagers could continue to cross over, though as limitations increased they were required to display identity papers, although everyone understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was placed on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two observation towers are preserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen details the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their crops; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Background

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither supported the communist regime nor resisted it, the director explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is likely to