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A stream so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers started memorialising their history. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which pulled families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the same inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the entire community, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a while, locals could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his working life creating it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they desired to keep. They selected a section on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Installations

Two observation towers are conserved alongside a collection of displays illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Farmers needed specific authorization to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary 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 commemorated and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit each year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big car park – is expected to