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A creek so narrow you barely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of residents began documenting their past. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, going to the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Post-War Division

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the whole community, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a time, villagers could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to show identity papers, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by ascending hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a western local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are maintained alongside a collection of exhibits illustrating the most significant dates in the community’s history. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the rules: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their crops; the spouse could work the combine harvester but not the pair, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but over double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big car park – is likely to