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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own wall was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about memorialising their past. The work 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 inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents drinking in the same tavern, going to the very same religious building and sending their young ones to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they appeared, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a year they took over the complete village, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back back over the creek. For a time, locals could continue to cross over, though as controls increased they were required to display ID, although everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a western resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard accounts like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They opted for a section on the Bavarian fringe, close to where one of their own was able to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Installations

Two observation towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed particular approval to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, for fear that they attempted to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but more than twice as many persons (well over 300) were killed attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited each year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is likely to