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An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents set about commemorating their history. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely finished. Addressing the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the very same inn, going to the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, creating their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, even though all knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his professional career developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wished to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a local resident succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are conserved in addition to a series of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required particular approval to tend to their crops; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not both, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but over two times more people (exceeding 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15k came to visit annually, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and large parking lot – is likely to