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An creek so narrow you barely got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was opened, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began commemorating their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk never stood in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same pub, going to the same church and sending their kids to the identical learning center.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they took over the whole community, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a time, locals could continue to cross over, though as limitations increased they were required to present identification, even though all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were forbidden. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they desired to keep. They chose a portion on the western fringe, close to where a villager was able to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of displays showing the most impactful events in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited each year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.

Current Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and large parking lot – is expected to