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An stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own barrier was opened, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about documenting their history. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which tore families asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk never stood in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same tavern, attending the identical church and placing their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole village, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to display identification, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a western resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life developing it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They selected a portion on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a local resident was able to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 guard towers are preserved together with a collection of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could use the harvesting machine but never both, lest they attempted to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Larger Background

The border between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (more than 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between two political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They did not backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to visit annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Current Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and large parking lot – is probable to