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A stream so low you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a group of local people set about commemorating their heritage. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Addressing the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for giving all its men the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the very same tavern, going to the same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the very same school.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were required to display ID, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Increase of Border Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were banned. One woman was put on a Stasi surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a West German local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his working life developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much wall they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the Bavarian fringe, near where a villager managed to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Installations

2 watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits showing the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s history. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but not both, lest they sought to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15k came to visit each year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and large car park – is expected to