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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for over four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a group of residents began documenting their past. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents socializing in the same pub, going to the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Division

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they took over the entire village, creating their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were forced to present identification, despite the fact that all was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a western resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, near where one of their own managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Structures

2 watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director lists the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) died trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand visited annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is expected to