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An stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people started memorialising their history. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the locals socializing in the very same pub, visiting the identical church and enrolling their young ones to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they came, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the complete hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to present ID, even though all understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his professional career building it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they desired to keep. They chose a portion on the western fringe, adjacent to where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the border was significantly fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 observation towers are conserved in addition to a collection of displays showing the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s history. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their produce; the partner could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (well over 300) died attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. Approximately 15k came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Current Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to