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An creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a village for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own barrier was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their past. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals socializing in the same pub, going to the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the identical learning center.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they seized the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to pull back across the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to display identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life creating it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how much structure they desired to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, near where a villager managed to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Preserved Structures

Two guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we walk, the director lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed special permission to look after their crops; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited each year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is likely to