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An stream so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was opened, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about documenting their history. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for giving all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the residents gathering in the very same tavern, visiting the identical religious building and sending their children to the identical school.

After the War Separation

Then came the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the brook. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I was told stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west edge, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Structures

Two observation towers are conserved alongside a collection of displays showing the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their produce; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more people (well over 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. About 15k visited annually, optical devices in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to