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An brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents began memorialising their past. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Telling the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the same pub, going to the identical religious building and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

After the War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the creek. For a year they seized the entire community, creating their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to pull back back over the creek. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were obliged to present identification, even though each person understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian resident who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I heard stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career building it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They opted for a section on the Bavarian fringe, near where a local resident was able to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, subsequently the border was significantly fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 guard towers are preserved alongside a collection of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to look after their fields; the partner could work the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but more than double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

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

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big parking lot – is likely to