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A stream so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a settlement for over four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents set about commemorating their past. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel split, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the locals socializing in the identical inn, visiting the same religious building and enrolling their kids to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they took over the complete village, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw back over the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to present ID, although all knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still observe each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was placed on a Stasi surveillance list for replying “back at you” to a western local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time creating it. Residents were consulted early on about how what length of structure they wanted to preserve. They selected a portion on the west perimeter, near where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

Two guard towers are maintained alongside a set of tableaux depicting the most impactful dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director enumerates the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the partner could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to escape. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more people (more than 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Village Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and large car park – is likely to