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A creek so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. US troops called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers began memorialising their history. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

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

Bygone Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for giving all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the residents drinking in the very same inn, visiting the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical educational institution.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a year they seized the complete community, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a while, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, although all understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. One woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a western local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked early on about how much barrier they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two observation towers are preserved alongside a collection of displays showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we stroll, the director lists the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their fields; the partner could operate the agricultural equipment but not both, lest they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Background

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but more than two times more persons (more than 300) died attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is likely to