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A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for over four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started memorialising their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 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 show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents socializing in the very same tavern, attending the identical church and placing their children to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Division

Then came the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show identity papers, even though everyone knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life creating it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They opted for a portion on the western fringe, close to where a villager succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Installations

Two observation towers are preserved together with a series of displays showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we move, the director details the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed particular approval to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never the two, lest they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to