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An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about documenting their heritage. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents gathering in the very same inn, visiting the same religious building and sending their children to the identical school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a while, locals could continue to cross over, though as controls tightened they were forced to display ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I was told accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Installations

Two guard towers are maintained together with a collection of tableaux showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to tend to their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but never both, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but over two times more individuals (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and large car park – is probable to