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A stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the manner of the residents drinking in the same tavern, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they came, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the whole village, establishing their command in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the brook. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to display identification, although all knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi surveillance list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his working life developing it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they desired to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian fringe, close to where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 guard towers are maintained together with a series of exhibits depicting the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we move, the director lists the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their crops; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but never the two, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big parking lot – is probable to