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A creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of residents began commemorating their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Telling the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, attending the same church and sending their young ones to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the complete hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could continue to cross over, though as limitations increased they were required to present identification, even though all was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Residents were polled early on about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Structures

Two observation towers are preserved alongside a set of displays depicting the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Wider Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but more than two times more individuals (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. Roughly 15k came to see annually, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big car park – is probable to