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A brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers set about commemorating their past. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal division, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for giving all its men the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the identical inn, attending the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the complete hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to present identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life developing it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to preserve. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Installations

2 guard towers are conserved in addition to a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents needed particular approval to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not both, in case they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see annually, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big car park – is probable to