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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was established first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people set about documenting their past. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not entirely ready. Telling the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the locals gathering in the very same inn, visiting the very same church and enrolling their children to the identical learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the entire community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were forced to present ID, although each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were banned. A local woman was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of wall they desired to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager was able to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

2 guard towers are preserved together with a collection of exhibits depicting the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of twice as many people (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They did not backed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit every year, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Modern Evolutions

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