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A creek so low you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their history. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely ready. Telling the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Past Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same pub, attending the same place of worship and placing their kids to the identical learning center.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the complete hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show ID, even though all understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they desired to maintain. They chose a stretch on the western fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers required particular approval to care for their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but not the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit annually, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to