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A stream so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own wall was opened, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their history. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Telling the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the very same church and sending their young ones to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to see each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a western resident who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his professional career creating it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to keep. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Structures

2 observation towers are conserved together with a collection of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed special permission to care for their crops; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but not both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but more than two times more people (more than 300) died attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Approximately 15,000 visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Current Developments

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