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A creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a community for over four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about commemorating their history. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely finished. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the same inn, attending the very same church and enrolling their children to the identical school.

After the War Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole village, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to show ID, although each person was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing hills, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Locals were asked early on about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They opted for a portion on the western edge, close to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Installations

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful dates in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never both, in case they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more people (more than 300) died seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see annually, viewing tools in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is expected to