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An brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, attending the same church and placing their children to the same educational institution.

After the War Division

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the entire hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could continue to jump across, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display identification, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were banned. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence watch list for replying “back at you” to a West German villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much structure they wished to maintain. They opted for a section on the west edge, near where a local resident managed to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a set of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, lest they tried to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but over two times more people (more than 300) were killed trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They neither backed the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a sort of destination. About fifteen thousand came to see every year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and sizable car park – is expected to