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A creek so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was opened, and before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers started commemorating their past. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, 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 display was not completely finished. Addressing the villagers who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals drinking in the very same tavern, going to the identical church and placing their children to the same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians erected wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to retreat back over the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could continue to observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “good new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked early on about how much barrier they desired to keep. They opted for a section on the Bavarian edge, near where one of their own managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 observation towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the border. Farmers required particular approval to look after their fields; the spouse could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but over twice as many persons (exceeding 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 visited annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large vehicle area – is likely to