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An brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades. By an accident of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started documenting their past. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical inn, visiting the very same religious building and placing their children to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the complete community, setting up their command in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a time, locals could still cross over, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to present ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a western villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were asked early on about how how long a section structure they desired to preserve. They selected a stretch on the western perimeter, near where one of their own managed to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved together with a collection of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but never both, in case they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) died attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to see each year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and large vehicle area – is expected to