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An brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their history. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants drinking in the same tavern, attending the same place of worship and sending their kids to the identical learning center.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the complete village, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to retreat across the brook. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were required to present identification, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how much structure they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but never both, for fear that they attempted to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but more than two times more people (well over 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to see each year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to