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A stream so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers started documenting their heritage. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely ready. Telling the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most renowned for bestowing all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical pub, attending the very same church and enrolling their kids to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to show ID, although each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were prohibited. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how how long a section structure they desired to preserve. They selected a section on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a villager was able to get away in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the border was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Installations

Two observation towers are maintained together with a set of displays depicting the most dramatic events in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never the two, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They did not supported the communist regime nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in their hands, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, cinema room and large parking lot – is expected to