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A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of residents began memorialising their past. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, attending the same religious building and enrolling their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians put up wood stakes by the creek. For a annual period they took over the complete village, creating their headquarters in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to pull back to the other side of the brook. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to display identity papers, although everyone understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were prohibited. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who said her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a significant portion of his professional career building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how how long a section wall they desired to maintain. They chose a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of watchtowers are conserved together with a series of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s history. As we move, Lebergen details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, lest they attempted to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Larger Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adapted to living in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither backed the socialist government nor fought it, the director states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is probable to