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A brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers started memorialising their past. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents gathering in the identical inn, visiting the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to pull back back over the creek. For a while, locals could continue to cross over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to display identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They selected a stretch on the western fringe, close to where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Structures

2 guard towers are preserved together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to look after their produce; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than twice as many individuals (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and big vehicle area – is probable to