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A stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their heritage. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Telling the villagers who lived through the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the community cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the quirk never stood in the manner of the locals drinking in the identical tavern, going to the identical place of worship and placing their young ones to the very same learning center.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw back over the creek. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were required to display identification, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Border Controls

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. A female resident was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German local who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were asked early on about how what length of structure they desired to preserve. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are preserved together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant events in the village’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to look after their produce; the spouse could use the harvesting machine but not the pair, in case they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Wider Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to residing in the grey zone between two belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither backed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see each year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and large parking lot – is expected to