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An creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents began memorialising their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which tore families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Origins

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the very same pub, going to the very same religious building and placing their children to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, residents could continue to hop over, though as controls increased they were obliged to display identity papers, even though each person knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a Stasi watch list for responding “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Locals were consulted early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, near where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

2 observation towers are conserved alongside a series of tableaux showing the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to care for their fields; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but not both, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of double the number people (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. the director tells me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and big parking lot – is likely to