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An creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people started memorialising their heritage. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, going to the identical church and placing their kids to the identical learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the entire community, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present ID, although each person understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his working life developing it. Locals were consulted early on about how how long a section structure they wished to keep. They selected a portion on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to escape in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director details the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to tend to their crops; the spouse could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Wider Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but over two times more people (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable car park – is probable to