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A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier 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 become one in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their heritage. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the residents drinking in the same inn, visiting the same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the entire community, setting up their command in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to present identity papers, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side waving and shouting were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a western villager who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life creating it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are conserved together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s history. As we stroll, the director enumerates the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required special permission to look after their fields; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but more than two times more people (more than 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between two political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is probable to