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An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their heritage. The project is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the residents drinking in the same inn, going to the same church and enrolling their kids to the very same learning center.

After the War Separation

Then came the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Russians erected wood stakes by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the complete hamlet, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw back over the stream. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were required to show identification, although all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western local who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career building it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how much structure they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, close to where one of their own was able to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the boundary was substantially fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained alongside a series of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the community’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their fields; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more people (more than 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Current Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is expected to