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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people began commemorating their heritage. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the manner of the residents gathering in the same tavern, going to the same religious building and enrolling their children to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they seized the complete community, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were forced to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how much wall they desired to keep. They opted for a portion on the west edge, near where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are conserved together with a set of tableaux depicting the most significant events in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to tend to their produce; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but not the two, for fear that they tried to flee. Military personnel kept guard.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About 15k came to see each year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big car park – is expected to