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A stream so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their heritage. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the same inn, attending the same church and placing their children to the very same learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they came, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the entire hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw back over the brook. For a while, residents could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identification, even though everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were prohibited. One woman was added to a Stasi watch list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were asked early on about how what length of wall they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west edge, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the boundary was significantly fortified.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained in addition to a collection of displays depicting the most dramatic events in the community’s history. As we walk, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but in excess of double the number people (exceeding 300) died seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Modern Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and large car park – is expected to