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An brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for over four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people set about memorialising their heritage. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the same tavern, attending the very same place of worship and placing their kids to the identical school.

Post-War Separation

Then came the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to withdraw across the brook. For a time, residents could continue to cross over, though as controls increased they were obliged to present identification, although each person was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still observe each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

2 guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits illustrating the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but never the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but in excess of two times more people (exceeding 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. the director tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15k visited every year, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and big parking lot – is probable to