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A creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about commemorating their history. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the locals drinking in the identical pub, going to the identical religious building and placing their young ones to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the entire community, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to withdraw across the creek. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to display identity papers, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the western edge, near where one of their own managed to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the border was significantly strengthened.

Preserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits depicting the most significant events in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain special permission to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Background

The border between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but in excess of double the number individuals (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 visited every year, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is probable to