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A brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people began documenting their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same inn, going to the same religious building and sending their young ones to the same school.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back across the brook. For a time, locals could continue to hop over, though as limitations increased they were required to show identity papers, although each person was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his working life building it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They chose a section on the west edge, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the border was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are maintained together with a set of displays depicting the most impactful dates in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the partner could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Context

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is expected to