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A stream so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents started memorialising their history. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, attending the identical place of worship and sending their kids to the identical school.

After the War Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole community, setting up their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw back over the creek. For a time, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were forced to show identification, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were asked early on about how how long a section structure they wished to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the border was heavily fortified.

Maintained Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, cinema room and big car park – is expected to