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An brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for over four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of local people began memorialising their history. The effort is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely finished. Addressing the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the identical church and sending their kids to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a while, villagers could continue to jump across, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to see each other by ascending hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “same to you” to a western resident who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his working life creating it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of structure they wanted to keep. They chose a portion on the western fringe, near where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, after which the border was significantly fortified.

Maintained Structures

A pair of watchtowers are maintained alongside a set of tableaux showing the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but not both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 visited each year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to