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A stream so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by coniferous woods, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and before their state had become one in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, attending the same church and enrolling their young ones to the identical school.

Post-War Split

Then came the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to withdraw across the creek. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to present identification, even though everyone understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I was told stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to maintain. They opted for a portion on the western edge, near where a villager was able to escape in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

2 guard towers are preserved alongside a set of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed particular approval to care for their fields; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but never the two, for fear that they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but more than two times more persons (more than 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross failed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Modern Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is expected to