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An creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of local people started documenting their heritage. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the identical pub, going to the same religious building and placing their kids to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the whole community, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back across the brook. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to present identification, although everyone understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a western villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Residents were consulted early on about how much structure they wished to maintain. They chose a portion on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the border was significantly fortified.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a series of displays depicting the most impactful events in the community’s history. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Farmers required particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, lest they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but over twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They did not supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of destination. About 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and large car park – is probable to