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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people began documenting their history. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals drinking in the very same tavern, going to the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the identical learning center.

After the War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire community, setting up their command in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back back over the creek. For a while, residents could continue to cross over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show identity papers, although everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a West German villager who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how much barrier they desired to preserve. They selected a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to escape in the darkest hours with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

2 observation towers are preserved alongside a collection of tableaux depicting the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, lest they tried to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is expected to