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A stream so low you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for over four decades. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their heritage. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely ready. Speaking to the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the locals drinking in the same pub, going to the same church and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the complete community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life developing it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wished to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western fringe, close to where a villager managed to escape in the darkest hours with a climbing device, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a set of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed special permission to care for their produce; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They did not backed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and large parking lot – is likely to