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An creek so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents started memorialising their past. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk did not stand in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the same tavern, going to the same religious building and placing their young ones to the same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they came, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they seized the entire village, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to pull back across the brook. For a while, residents could continue to hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to show identification, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Development

I heard narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how what length of barrier they desired to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where one of their own succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a collection of displays illustrating the most significant dates in the hamlet’s history. As we move, the director lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, in case they tried to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (more than 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. the director reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They did not backed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and sizable car park – is expected to