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An creek so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about commemorating their past. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

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

Bygone Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the inhabitants socializing in the very same inn, attending the identical church and placing their young ones to the identical educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the whole community, establishing their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to pull back back over the brook. For a period, residents could still cross over, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The locals could continue to observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were banned. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “likewise” to a Bavarian resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were asked early on about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a section on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are maintained in addition to a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s past. As we stroll, the director details the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed specific authorization to care for their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Context

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but more than double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Current Evolutions

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