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An brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of residents began documenting their past. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, visiting the very same religious building and placing their kids to the identical school.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they came, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the complete community, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as controls tightened they were required to show ID, although all knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German villager who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wished to maintain. They selected a section on the western edge, near where one of their own succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved in addition to a set of displays depicting the most significant dates in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the agricultural equipment but not both, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but over two times more people (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. About 15k came to see each year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and large car park – is likely to