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An stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started commemorating their past. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the identical inn, going to the very same place of worship and placing their children to the identical learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole village, creating their control center in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a time, residents could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display ID, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted early on about how much structure they wanted to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, near where a local resident was able to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits depicting the most dramatic moments in the community’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never both, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than double the number persons (well over 300) died attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. About 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and large parking lot – is probable to