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A brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, pastures and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own wall was opened, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical inn, visiting the same place of worship and placing their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians erected wooden posts by the brook. For a year they took over the whole village, establishing their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to present identification, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a western resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Residents were consulted early on about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They selected a portion on the western edge, near where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of displays depicting the most significant dates in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director lists the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents required special permission to tend to their fields; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but never the two, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but over double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. the director tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 visited every year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and sizable car park – is likely to