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An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents set about commemorating their past. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the very same pub, going to the very same religious building and placing their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole village, setting up their control center in a house on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a time, villagers could continue to jump across, though as restrictions increased they were required to present identity papers, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were banned. A local woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “back at you” to a western villager who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how much barrier they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the west fringe, close to where a local resident was able to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the border was substantially fortified.

Maintained Buildings

Two watchtowers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most significant dates in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to look after their produce; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Background

The border between West Germany and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but over twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to