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An stream so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had become one in 1990, a collection of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the same tavern, attending the same religious building and sending their children to the identical school.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to display identification, although everyone knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were polled early on about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where one of their own was able to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Installations

2 watchtowers are maintained together with a collection of tableaux illustrating the most significant dates in the community’s history. As we move, the director lists the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to tend to their crops; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but more than twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to see each year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and large car park – is probable to