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A stream so low you hardly got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was opened, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents set about commemorating their heritage. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals drinking in the identical inn, attending the very same place of worship and placing their young ones to the identical learning center.

After the War Division

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they took over the complete community, creating their control center in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as controls increased they were required to present identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are maintained together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic events in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their crops; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but more than twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They neither backed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited each year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to