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A creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own wall was opened, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people set about documenting their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Telling the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

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

Bygone Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the residents socializing in the very same inn, attending the very same place of worship and placing their young ones to the same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the creek. For a year they occupied the whole village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to withdraw across the stream. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were forced to display identification, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and yelling were banned. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “likewise” to a West German villager who wished her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time creating it. Locals were polled early on about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Structures

2 guard towers are maintained in addition to a collection of tableaux illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s past. As we walk, the director lists the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents needed special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could use the combine harvester but not both, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but more than double the number individuals (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They did not backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit each year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Modern Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, movie theater and big car park – is expected to