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A stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their heritage. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

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

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the locals gathering in the same tavern, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were forced to display ID, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence watch list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, near where one of their own was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of observation towers are maintained together with a series of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, in case they attempted to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but more than twice as many persons (exceeding 300) died attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and large vehicle area – is likely to