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An stream so narrow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by pine forests, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about documenting their heritage. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals socializing in the same pub, attending the identical church and sending their children to the identical learning center.

After the War Split

Then came the global conflict. The moment they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the complete community, establishing their command in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the brook. For a while, locals could continue to jump across, though as controls increased they were required to present ID, even though everyone was aware who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his occupational time developing it. Residents were polled early on about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the western perimeter, near where a villager managed to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was heavily fortified.

Conserved Installations

2 observation towers are maintained alongside a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the rules: no one could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to look after their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more people (exceeding 300) died attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director reminds me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of destination. Roughly 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big car park – is probable to