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A creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents gathering in the same inn, visiting the identical church and sending their young ones to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to pull back back over the brook. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show ID, although everyone knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the west fringe, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the border was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s history. As we move, Lebergen lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents required particular approval to look after their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but more than two times more persons (more than 300) died attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly 15k visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and big parking lot – is probable to