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A creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers began documenting their past. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the locals gathering in the identical pub, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the identical school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they took over the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat back over the stream. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to display ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of wall they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the west fringe, near where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they tried to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but over two times more persons (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is likely to