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An stream so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for more than four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers set about documenting their past. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

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

Past Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, visiting the very same church and placing their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Then came the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the complete village, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display ID, despite the fact that each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life developing it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the western edge, adjacent to where a villager was able to flee in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a collection of exhibits depicting the most impactful dates in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director details the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, lest they sought to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but over twice as many individuals (well over 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 visited every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and big vehicle area – is likely to