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An stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely ready. Telling the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

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

Past Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants drinking in the same inn, attending the same religious building and sending their kids to the same school.

Following WWII Division

Then came the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the entire community, creating their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat back over the creek. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to present identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his professional career developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the border was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

2 watchtowers are conserved in addition to a series of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of double the number people (well over 300) were killed seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between 2 political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They did not backed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is probable to