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A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents set about documenting their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the same inn, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the identical school.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the complete village, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were required to display identification, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Locals were polled early on about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They selected a stretch on the west perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Installations

Two watchtowers are conserved together with a set of tableaux depicting the most dramatic dates in the community’s past. As we move, the director lists the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents needed special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but not the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number people (well over 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. the director informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They did not backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, store, film screening area and large parking lot – is expected to