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An brook so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own division was opened, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers began commemorating their heritage. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Telling the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

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

Historical Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, attending the identical church and sending their kids to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they seized the whole community, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a western local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They opted for a section on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where a local resident was able to flee in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Maintained Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s past. As we walk, the director details the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers required special permission to care for their produce; the partner could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but in excess of two times more people (well over 300) died trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

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

25 years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Current Developments

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is likely to