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A brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people started memorialising their heritage. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the inhabitants gathering in the very same tavern, going to the very same place of worship and placing their young ones to the same school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the whole hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back across the creek. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display identification, although each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his professional career building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They selected a stretch on the western fringe, adjacent to where one of their own succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Preserved Installations

Two observation towers are conserved together with a series of displays showing the most impactful moments in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to look after their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never both, in case they attempted to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but over two times more persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They did not backed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. Approximately 15k came to see every year, optical devices in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and big parking lot – is probable to