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An brook so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers began memorialising their past. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the same pub, visiting the same church and sending their children to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the whole community, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the creek. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, although everyone understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his occupational time creating it. Locals were polled early on about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, near where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two guard towers are preserved alongside a set of exhibits depicting the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to care for their crops; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but not both, lest they tried to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but more than twice as many persons (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Modern Changes

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and large car park – is probable to