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An creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Addressing the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Historical Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the locals drinking in the very same pub, visiting the same church and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Then came the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they seized the entire village, creating their command in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, residents could continue to hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present ID, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his working life creating it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how much wall they wished to maintain. They chose a portion on the west perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, the director lists the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed special permission to care for their crops; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than two times more individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They did not backed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited each year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and big vehicle area – is probable to