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A creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers set about commemorating their history. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely finished. Addressing the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the locals socializing in the same inn, attending the identical religious building and placing their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole community, establishing their command in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a time, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were forced to display ID, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were prohibited. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life creating it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western fringe, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most impactful events in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen details the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not the two, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but over two times more persons (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither supported the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 visited each year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and large car park – is likely to