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An brook so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents began memorialising their past. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Addressing the villagers who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, visiting the very same church and placing their children to the very same school.

After the War Split

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the stream. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to show ID, even though all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a western resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I heard narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wanted to maintain. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen details the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but not both, in case they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but more than two times more persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. About 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and big car park – is probable to