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A stream so low you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had become one in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the very same inn, visiting the very same church and sending their kids to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they occupied the complete village, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. One woman was put on a Stasi watch list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his professional career building it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are maintained alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but in excess of double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is probable to