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An creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their heritage. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the manner of the residents gathering in the very same tavern, attending the identical religious building and sending their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they seized the complete community, creating their command in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show identification, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a West German local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how how long a section structure they wished to keep. They selected a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but never both, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big parking lot – is likely to