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An creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started commemorating their history. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Telling the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the identical pub, visiting the identical church and placing their kids to the very same school.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were forced to present identification, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. One woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time creating it. Residents were asked early on about how much wall they wanted to maintain. They selected a section on the west edge, adjacent to where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited every year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is likely to