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A stream so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the very same pub, visiting the identical religious building and sending their kids to the very same school.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to display ID, although all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were prohibited. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his professional career creating it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits depicting the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Farmers required special permission to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more persons (more than 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and big car park – is likely to