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An brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals gathering in the identical pub, attending the same church and sending their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete community, creating their control center in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were required to present ID, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were banned. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life building it. Villagers were asked early on about how how long a section structure they wished to maintain. They opted for a portion on the west edge, close to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director details the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to look after their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but not the two, in case they sought to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but more than double the number persons (exceeding 300) died attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Current Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and sizable car park – is probable to