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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own division was breached, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began documenting their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely finished. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the residents drinking in the identical tavern, going to the very same church and sending their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the complete community, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to present ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his working life building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They selected a section on the western perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits showing the most impactful events in the community’s history. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed specific authorization to look after their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they sought to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but over twice as many people (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is expected to