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An creek so low you hardly got your feet wet split a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their past. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which pulled households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the same inn, going to the very same church and sending their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the whole village, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to display ID, although all understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, near where one of their own succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

Two observation towers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but in excess of double the number people (well over 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, 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 East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to visit annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is expected to