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An brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of residents began commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which tore households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the locals drinking in the same inn, going to the very same religious building and enrolling their children to the same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they took over the whole village, creating their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as controls increased they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career creating it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a collection of exhibits depicting the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their fields; the partner could operate the agricultural equipment but never both, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but over double the number persons (more than 300) died trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and large car park – is likely to