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An creek so low you barely got your ankles wet split a community for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a group of residents started documenting their heritage. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Addressing the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the identical pub, going to the identical place of worship and placing their young ones to the very same school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a year they occupied the entire village, establishing their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw across the brook. For a period, locals could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present ID, although everyone knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the western fringe, adjacent to where a local resident was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was significantly fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of twice as many individuals (more than 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of destination. About 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is expected to