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An stream so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about documenting their past. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

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

Historical Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the locals gathering in the same tavern, going to the very same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the whole village, creating their command in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat back over the stream. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to present identity papers, although all was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were banned. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a western local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were polled early on about how much wall they desired to maintain. They chose a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most impactful events in the village’s history. As we move, the director details the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers required specific authorization to care for their produce; the spouse could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Background

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but in excess of double the number persons (more than 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to