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An creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers began memorialising their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely finished. Speaking to the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents drinking in the very same tavern, going to the same religious building and placing their children to the same school.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the complete community, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a western local who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Locals were asked early on about how much structure they wanted to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the western fringe, near where a local resident succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are preserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic events in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About 15,000 came to visit annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is probable to