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An creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people started memorialising their past. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Telling the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents socializing in the very same tavern, attending the very same place of worship and placing their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the stream. For a year they occupied the entire village, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were required to show ID, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They opted for a portion on the western fringe, near where a local resident managed to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are preserved alongside a set of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to care for their crops; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many persons (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They did not supported the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of destination. Roughly 15k came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is probable to