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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their country had become one in 1990, a group of local people began documenting their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore relatives into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the locals gathering in the same pub, going to the same religious building and placing their young ones to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the complete village, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back back over the brook. For a period, residents could continue to cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to show identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for responding “same to you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They selected a portion on the western perimeter, near where a villager managed to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

2 guard towers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to care for their produce; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k came to see every year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to