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An brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents socializing in the same tavern, visiting the very same church and placing their kids to the very same school.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their command in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the stream. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as controls increased they were forced to show identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a East German secret police watch list for replying “same to you” to a western local who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent much of his professional career building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to preserve. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the border was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two guard towers are preserved together with a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s past. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but not both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but in excess of two times more persons (exceeding 300) died trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They did not supported the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and sizable car park – is probable to