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A brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. 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 fence and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their country had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the same place of worship and placing their kids to the very same learning center.

After the War Split

Then came the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the entire community, establishing their command in a house on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, although everyone understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were polled early on about how much barrier they wanted to keep. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where one of their own managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Lebergen details the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, in case they attempted to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and large car park – is probable to