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A creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same inn, attending the same church and sending their children to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, residents could continue to jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to display identification, although each person was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his professional career building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are maintained alongside a series of exhibits depicting the most significant events in the hamlet’s history. As we move, the director details the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required special permission to care for their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, lest they attempted to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but in excess of two times more individuals (exceeding 300) died attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Changes

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