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A stream so low you scarcely got your feet wet divided a settlement for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a collection of local people started commemorating their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely finished. Telling the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the same pub, attending the very same church and placing their children to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they seized the complete hamlet, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the stream. For a period, locals could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to display ID, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, near where one of their own managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Installations

2 watchtowers are conserved in addition to a set of displays depicting the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers required particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but over two times more people (more than 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by staying low-profile and tending to their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to renewed interest.

Modern Changes

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