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An creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of local people began memorialising their heritage. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk never stood in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the very same tavern, going to the same religious building and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, setting up their headquarters in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to retreat across the brook. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to show identification, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Locals were asked early on about how much structure they wanted to preserve. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager managed to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved alongside a collection of displays depicting the most significant dates in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers required particular approval to look after their produce; the partner could operate the agricultural equipment but not the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but over double the number people (more than 300) died attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited each year, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is probable to