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A creek so low you barely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. By an accident of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their heritage. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the locals socializing in the very same inn, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same learning center.

After the War Split

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole village, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the stream. For a time, residents could continue to hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to present identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life building it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 guard towers are maintained together with a collection of displays depicting the most dramatic dates in the community’s history. As we walk, the director details the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to look after their produce; the spouse could work the combine harvester but never the two, for fear that they sought to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand visited each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, movie theater and big vehicle area – is probable to