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An creek so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own division was opened, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents started commemorating their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal split, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk never stood in the path of the residents drinking in the same pub, attending the very same place of worship and placing their children to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they seized the complete village, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were obliged to display ID, although all knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time developing it. Locals were asked early on about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, near where a local resident managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most dramatic moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but not the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their land. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. About 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in possession, to stare – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Modern Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and sizable car park – is likely to