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An brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people started documenting their history. The project is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals drinking in the same inn, visiting the identical church and enrolling their kids to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they came, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole community, creating their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the stream. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were required to show identity papers, although each person understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to see each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “likewise” to a western villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how how long a section structure they wished to preserve. They selected a portion on the west edge, near where a local resident managed to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful events in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required particular approval to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never the two, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but over two times more people (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They neither supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to stare – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and large car park – is probable to