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A creek so low you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, going to the identical church and placing their kids to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to retreat back over the creek. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to present identification, even though all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for replying “back at you” to a West German local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how how long a section structure they wanted to maintain. They chose a stretch on the western perimeter, near where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Structures

2 guard towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic events in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) died attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited annually, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to