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An brook so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a community for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their country had become one in 1990, a assembly of residents set about documenting their past. The work is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity never stood in the manner of the locals gathering in the same pub, visiting the same place of worship and sending their young ones to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they seized the entire village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to pull back across the stream. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to show identity papers, despite the fact that all was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was put on a Stasi surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how much barrier they wanted to preserve. They opted for a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager was able to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

Two guard towers are maintained together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s past. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required particular approval to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but more than double the number persons (more than 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and sizable vehicle area – is likely to