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An stream so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own wall was opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of residents set about documenting their history. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the way of the locals socializing in the same inn, visiting the very same religious building and sending their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back across the brook. For a period, villagers could continue to jump across, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, although each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to see each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side waving and shouting were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a western local who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

I heard stories such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life developing it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how much structure they wanted to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west edge, close to where one of their own succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Preserved Installations

2 watchtowers are maintained together with a collection of tableaux depicting the most significant events in the village’s history. As we move, Lebergen details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents required special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but not both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more persons (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. About fifteen thousand came to see annually, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and large vehicle area – is expected to