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An brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their history. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the very same pub, going to the same place of worship and placing their kids to the same school.

Post-War Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians erected wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as controls increased they were obliged to display ID, even though each person knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were forbidden. A local woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a West German villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much structure they desired to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a local resident managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of tableaux depicting the most impactful events in the community’s history. As we move, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to look after their fields; the partner could operate the combine harvester but not the two, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Context

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, the director explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15k visited each year, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to