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An brook so low you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents set about commemorating their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely ready. Addressing the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents gathering in the same pub, attending the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Following WWII Division

Then came the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as controls increased they were required to present identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western perimeter, close to where a local resident was able to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s history. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to care for their fields; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but never the two, in case they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but more than twice as many people (exceeding 300) died trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They neither backed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is expected to