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A stream so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers began documenting their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Addressing the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for giving all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the same inn, attending the identical place of worship and sending their kids to the same school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw back over the stream. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as controls increased they were forced to display ID, despite the fact that each person was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life building it. Residents were polled early on about how much wall they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the border was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are maintained together with a series of displays illustrating the most impactful events in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director details the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more individuals (more than 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of destination. About fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big car park – is probable to