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A brook so low you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own division was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers began memorialising their past. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the very same tavern, going to the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the same school.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the complete village, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to pull back across the stream. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much structure they wished to maintain. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Installations

2 observation towers are conserved together with a series of displays depicting the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed special permission to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, lest they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but in excess of two times more persons (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit every year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to