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An stream so low you hardly got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own division was opened, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers began documenting their heritage. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same pub, visiting the identical church and sending their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the whole community, establishing their command in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, although all knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by ascending slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a Stasi watch list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked at an early stage about how much barrier they wished to preserve. They chose a section on the western perimeter, close to where a local resident was able to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Installations

Two guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of exhibits showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Wider Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They did not supported the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit each year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Modern Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and large car park – is probable to