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An brook so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own division was opened, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their heritage. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the identical church and placing their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russians erected wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they seized the entire hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces convinced them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how much barrier they desired to maintain. They selected a stretch on the western perimeter, near where a local resident was able to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 guard towers are conserved together with a series of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to care for their produce; the spouse could use the combine harvester but not both, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The border between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over two times more individuals (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to visit annually, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is probable to