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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Small 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 began documenting their past. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same tavern, visiting the identical church and sending their young ones to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they seized the entire hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the brook. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were obliged to show identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could continue to view each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were prohibited. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Locals were asked early on about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, close to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved alongside a collection of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers required special permission to look after their produce; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but never the pair, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but over double the number persons (more than 300) died attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of destination. About fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Current Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, movie theater and sizable car park – is likely to