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An stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people set about memorialising their heritage. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Historical Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same pub, attending the very same religious building and sending their young ones to the same learning center.

After the War Division

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the whole village, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw across the brook. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were forced to present identity papers, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to view each other by ascending slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A local woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the west edge, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Structures

Two guard towers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers required special permission to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but not the two, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is likely to