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A stream so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, attending the very same church and placing their young ones to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Then came the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the complete hamlet, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back back over the brook. For a while, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to present identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his professional career creating it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They chose a section on the western edge, close to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

2 watchtowers are conserved together with a collection of exhibits depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to look after their crops; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never both, in case they tried to flee. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but in excess of two times more individuals (well over 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between 2 political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and large car park – is expected to