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An stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began documenting their past. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

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

Bygone Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents drinking in the very same pub, going to the same religious building and placing their young ones to the identical learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the whole community, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to retreat back over the brook. For a period, villagers could still cross over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to display identification, although all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own was able to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to tend to their produce; the partner could use the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they attempted to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (more than 300) died seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and large parking lot – is probable to