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An brook so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their country had become one in 1990, a collection of residents started memorialising their heritage. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped households apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the residents drinking in the identical pub, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russians put up timber poles by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete village, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a period, residents could continue to hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to show identity papers, although all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were prohibited. One woman was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “good new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how how long a section structure they desired to preserve. They opted for a portion on the west edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic events in the village’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their crops; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but not the pair, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but more than two times more people (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither supported the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15k visited annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big vehicle area – is probable to