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An brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began commemorating their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Speaking to the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the residents drinking in the very same tavern, going to the identical place of worship and sending their children to the same school.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russians put up wood stakes by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat to the other side of the creek. For a time, residents could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were required to present identification, even though all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his occupational time developing it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, near where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a series of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we stroll, the director enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their crops; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but not both, in case they tried to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Larger Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but more than twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed trying to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Current Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to