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A creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began documenting their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Addressing the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals drinking in the same tavern, going to the very same place of worship and sending their kids to the same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians erected timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the stream. For a period, residents could continue to hop over, though as controls tightened they were forced to display identification, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much wall they desired to preserve. They selected a stretch on the western edge, near where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays showing the most dramatic events in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen details the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but in excess of two times more persons (exceeding 300) died seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to