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A stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, pastures and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their country had become one in 1990, a group of residents began memorialising their past. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely ready. Telling the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the same pub, visiting the same church and enrolling their children to the identical school.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the brook. For a year they seized the whole village, setting up their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to retreat back over the brook. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show ID, although each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were consulted early on about how how long a section structure they desired to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Installations

2 watchtowers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits showing the most impactful dates in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they sought to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Context

The border between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of twice as many individuals (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor opposed it, the director states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and sizable car park – is expected to