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An stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their history. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the identical inn, attending the very same place of worship and placing their children to the very same school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the entire village, establishing their headquarters in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display identity papers, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for replying “back at you” to a western villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They chose a stretch on the western edge, near where a local resident succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays showing the most impactful events in the village’s history. As we walk, Lebergen details the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most, but more than two times more persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. the director reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They did not endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see every year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, movie theater and big vehicle area – is likely to