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A brook so shallow you barely got your ankles wet separated a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents started memorialising their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely finished. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled households asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals gathering in the same tavern, going to the same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the identical learning center.

After the War Split

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russians put up wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they seized the complete hamlet, creating their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a period, villagers could continue to cross over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to present identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were prohibited. One woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life developing it. Residents were consulted early on about how how long a section structure they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a series of displays illustrating the most impactful dates in the village’s history. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed special permission to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over double the number persons (more than 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited every year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, cinema room and large car park – is likely to