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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a group of villagers set about documenting their heritage. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Addressing the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the identical inn, going to the very same place of worship and sending their children to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the whole community, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a period, locals could continue to jump across, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to show identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by ascending hills, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to preserve. They selected a stretch on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Structures

Two observation towers are preserved in addition to a series of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but in excess of double the number people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and big car park – is probable to