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A creek so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Months after their own division was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started documenting their heritage. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, 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 show was not completely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the residents gathering in the very same pub, attending the identical religious building and sending their children to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Split

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the entire village, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were obliged to present identity papers, even though everyone knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. One woman was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his professional career developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they wanted to preserve. They selected a section on the west perimeter, close to where a villager was able to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most significant moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain special permission to look after their produce; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Modern Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to