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A brook so shallow you barely got your ankles wet split a community for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was opened, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their history. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk never stood in the way of the locals drinking in the very same pub, visiting the identical religious building and sending their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the entire community, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to retreat across the stream. For a while, locals could continue to jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were obliged to present identification, despite the fact that everyone was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how much barrier they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the Bavarian edge, near where a villager succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of exhibits depicting the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we move, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their produce; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but never the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but more than twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. Approximately 15k came to see each year, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is likely to