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A stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of residents started commemorating their history. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the residents drinking in the same tavern, visiting the very same place of worship and sending their children to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the complete village, creating their control center in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a period, villagers could continue to hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his working life building it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the western perimeter, close to where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

2 observation towers are preserved together with a set of tableaux showing the most impactful moments in the village’s history. As we move, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents needed special permission to care for their fields; the partner could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, in case they sought to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but more than two times more people (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large vehicle area – is probable to