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An stream so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their young ones to the same educational institution.

After the War Division

Next arrived the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls increased they were required to display identity papers, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were banned. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

It was related to me stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his occupational time building it. Residents were consulted at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wished to preserve. They selected a stretch on the western fringe, close to where a local resident succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a series of exhibits depicting the most significant moments in the village’s history. As we move, the director lists the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to tend to their produce; the spouse could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, the director states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15k visited each year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and sizable vehicle area – is likely to