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A brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started commemorating their history. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal split, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the identical place of worship and sending their children to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they took over the whole hamlet, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were forced to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his working life building it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Structures

2 observation towers are conserved together with a series of exhibits depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number people (more than 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. Approximately 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to