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A creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers began commemorating their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely ready. Addressing the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the same tavern, going to the very same church and enrolling their young ones to the identical school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the whole village, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the stream. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to display identification, although everyone understood who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a western resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wanted to preserve. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, close to where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Structures

Two guard towers are preserved together with a collection of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic dates in the village’s history. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but more than twice as many individuals (well over 300) died seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Approximately 15k visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and large parking lot – is likely to