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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people started commemorating their past. 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 inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, going to the very same place of worship and sending their children to the identical learning center.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the stream. For a year they seized the complete community, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to retreat across the creek. For a time, villagers could continue to jump across, though as restrictions increased they were forced to present identity papers, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could continue to see each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were polled early on about how much barrier they wanted to preserve. They selected a section on the western fringe, close to where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the agricultural equipment but never both, in case they tried to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but over twice as many persons (more than 300) died seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit each year, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, store, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is probable to