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An stream so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began memorialising their history. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the very same pub, attending the same religious building and placing their children to the very same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the complete community, setting up their command in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw back over the creek. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show ID, despite the fact that all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Villagers were asked early on about how how long a section barrier they desired to keep. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the border was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Installations

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their crops; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they attempted to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (more than 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director informs me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to see each year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is expected to