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An creek so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their history. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the manner of the locals socializing in the very same tavern, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the same school.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to present ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how much barrier they wanted to preserve. They selected a portion on the western fringe, near where one of their own succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are preserved together with a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to care for their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between two political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15k visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, store, movie theater and big parking lot – is expected to