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A stream so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of villagers began documenting their history. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the very same inn, visiting the very same religious building and enrolling their children to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a year they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw across the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions increased they were required to present identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. One woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his professional career developing it. Locals were polled early on about how what length of structure they desired to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a collection of exhibits showing the most significant dates in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director details the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they tried to flee. Military personnel kept guard.

Larger Background

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more people (well over 300) died seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to visit annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a fictional hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big vehicle area – is likely to