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A creek so low you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their heritage. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the identical pub, visiting the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they seized the complete community, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the stream. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to present identification, although each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side signaling and yelling were banned. One woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a western villager who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Villagers were asked early on about how much barrier they wanted to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Installations

A pair of observation towers are preserved together with a set of tableaux depicting the most significant dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required special permission to care for their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they tried to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. the director tells me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and large vehicle area – is likely to