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An creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was breached, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of residents began documenting their heritage. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely prepared. Telling the residents who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the very same pub, going to the same religious building and enrolling their kids to the identical school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the entire hamlet, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to show ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time creating it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how how long a section wall they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

2 observation towers are conserved together with a series of tableaux depicting the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to see annually, binoculars in hand, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and big car park – is likely to