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A brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

Months after their own division was breached, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about commemorating their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the locals gathering in the identical pub, going to the very same church and placing their children to the very same educational institution.

After the War Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, setting up their command in a dwelling on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to withdraw across the creek. For a period, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to display identity papers, even though each person was aware who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still view each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They chose a section on the western edge, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the border was significantly strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are conserved in addition to a collection of displays illustrating the most dramatic events in the community’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Background

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but over two times more people (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15k visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary village like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and sizable car park – is likely to