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An brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades. By an accident of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own division was opened, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their heritage. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Addressing the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same inn, attending the very same place of worship and placing their kids to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the whole village, creating their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw back over the brook. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were required to present identification, even though all understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Border Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could continue to view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a western resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his professional career creating it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of barrier they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the west edge, near where one of their own was able to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Conserved Structures

Two guard towers are maintained together with a collection of exhibits showing the most dramatic dates in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to look after their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but over double the number individuals (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

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