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An stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, going to the very same place of worship and placing their young ones to the identical learning center.

Post-War Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the entire community, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to present ID, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his working life building it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to preserve. They chose a portion on the west perimeter, close to where a villager succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved in addition to a collection of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but not the two, lest they attempted to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but more than double the number people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited each year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and large vehicle area – is expected to