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A stream so shallow you barely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was breached, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their past. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants drinking in the very same inn, visiting the same place of worship and placing their children to the very same school.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they took over the whole village, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to pull back across the brook. For a time, villagers could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were forced to present identity papers, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his professional career creating it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to preserve. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian edge, near where a local resident managed to get away in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the border was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required particular approval to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but not the pair, in case they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but over two times more individuals (more than 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They did not supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited each year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to