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An brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people began documenting their heritage. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk never stood in the manner of the residents socializing in the identical inn, attending the identical church and enrolling their young ones to the same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the whole village, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to retreat across the brook. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to present ID, although all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wanted to maintain. They opted for a section on the west fringe, close to where a villager managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a set of tableaux depicting the most significant dates in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to care for their fields; the partner could operate the agricultural equipment but never the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and big vehicle area – is probable to