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A stream so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle 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 nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own division was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk never stood in the manner of the residents gathering in the identical pub, visiting the identical religious building and placing their young ones to the identical school.

Post-War Split

Then came the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the entire community, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back across the stream. For a time, residents could continue to cross over, though as limitations increased they were forced to show identity papers, although each person was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Locals were asked early on about how much barrier they wished to maintain. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of tableaux showing the most significant moments in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their fields; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they tried to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over double the number persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They did not supported the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to