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An brook so narrow you barely got your feet wet separated a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people started memorialising their history. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the same tavern, attending the very same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they came, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they seized the entire village, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a time, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to display identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. A female resident was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a western local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a portion on the west fringe, close to where a local resident was able to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but not the two, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of two times more people (more than 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Modern Changes

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and large car park – is expected to