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A creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the very same inn, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the same learning center.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, although each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could continue to see each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian fringe, near where a villager managed to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Buildings

2 observation towers are preserved together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant events in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The border between West Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but more than double the number persons (well over 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and large parking lot – is likely to