Big trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: the tiny hamlet split in two by the cold war

A new museum in Mödlareuth tells the story of how a settlement of only 50 people straddled Bavaria in West Germany and Thuringia in the east

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the (big) Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”