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An brook so shallow you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the very same pub, going to the same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the whole community, creating their control center in a house on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the stream. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were forced to show identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life creating it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, near where a local resident was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of observation towers are conserved in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful events in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen lists the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, in case they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They neither backed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and sizable car park – is expected to