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A brook so low you barely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people began memorialising their history. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the very same pub, attending the same religious building and enrolling their kids to the identical learning center.

After the War Split

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a western resident who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of exhibits depicting the most significant events in the village’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but more than twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. About 15k visited each year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to