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A brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Addressing the villagers who experienced the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the identical inn, attending the identical church and sending their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Division

Then came the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians installed timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to pull back back over the creek. For a while, locals could continue to cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to show ID, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side waving and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to keep. They opted for a portion on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, the director lists the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but never the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to