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An brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents started documenting their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Addressing the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal division, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the identical pub, attending the very same church and sending their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russians put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a time, residents could still jump across, though as controls increased they were obliged to display identity papers, even though all was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were prohibited. One woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German local who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his working life creating it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of barrier they wished to preserve. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits depicting the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, the director lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Context

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Current Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is expected to