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A brook so low you hardly got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of residents 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 formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely prepared. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the same tavern, attending the very same religious building and sending their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they occupied the whole community, setting up their command in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to present identification, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. One woman was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how much wall they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west edge, near where a villager was able to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Structures

Two watchtowers are preserved together with a set of exhibits depicting the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required particular approval to look after their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but not the pair, for fear that they sought to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (more than 300) died attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, the director explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Current Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is probable to