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A stream so low you barely got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own division was breached, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents started documenting their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Context

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the same tavern, attending the identical religious building and sending their kids to the very same educational institution.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole community, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a time, locals could continue to jump across, though as limitations tightened they were forced to present identity papers, although everyone was aware who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with mines, tank traps and observation points. The villagers could continue to observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were forbidden. A female resident was added to a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted early on about how what length of barrier they wanted to preserve. They opted for a section on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, after which the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s past. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they sought to flee. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but more than two times more individuals (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is likely to