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A brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people began documenting their history. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Telling the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the manner of the residents drinking in the same tavern, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the complete community, creating their command in a house on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to present ID, although everyone knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were banned. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Preserved Installations

2 guard towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux depicting the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they attempted to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but over double the number people (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their farms. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is likely to