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A stream so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a village for in excess of four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own barrier was breached, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people set about documenting their history. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals drinking in the same tavern, going to the identical religious building and enrolling their children to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the creek. For a year they seized the complete community, establishing their control center in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, although everyone knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were forbidden. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Conserved Structures

2 guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of exhibits showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but never the two, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but over two times more individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to see each year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is expected to