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A brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their heritage. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse 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 the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for giving all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the same pub, visiting the very same church and enrolling their kids to the same educational institution.

After the War Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the brook. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could continue to hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present identification, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, in case they sought to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see each year, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and large parking lot – is expected to