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A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of local people began commemorating their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the locals socializing in the very same inn, going to the identical church and sending their children to the identical school.

After the War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the whole hamlet, creating their command in a house on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a time, locals could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the east side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section barrier they wished to preserve. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved in addition to a collection of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but more than double the number persons (more than 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They did not supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and sizable car park – is likely to