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A creek so low you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own barrier was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about documenting their past. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the locals drinking in the very same pub, attending the same religious building and placing their young ones to the same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they took over the whole community, setting up their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a time, locals could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were required to display ID, although each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was added to a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a western villager who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life developing it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was substantially fortified.

Maintained Structures

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a series of displays depicting the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed particular approval to look after their crops; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West 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 recalled and honored the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) died trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is likely to