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A creek so low you barely got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own wall was opened, and before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers started commemorating their past. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the residents gathering in the identical inn, attending the identical religious building and sending their children to the same learning center.

After the War Separation

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they took over the complete village, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, villagers could continue to hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to present ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. One woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west edge, close to where a villager succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Structures

2 watchtowers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Lebergen details the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed particular approval to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of twice as many individuals (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15k came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and large vehicle area – is probable to