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An creek so low you barely got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely prepared. Addressing the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals gathering in the same inn, visiting the very same place of worship and sending their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they seized the entire community, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a while, residents could continue to hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I heard narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the western fringe, near where one of their own was able to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are preserved in addition to a collection of displays depicting the most impactful moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not the two, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) died trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a television program about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is likely to