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A brook so low you scarcely got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had become one in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely finished. Addressing the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity did not stand in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, going to the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they seized the complete hamlet, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to pull back back over the stream. For a period, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to show ID, even though everyone understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could continue to observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for replying “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time creating it. Locals were asked early on about how how long a section wall they desired to maintain. They chose a section on the Bavarian edge, close to where one of their own was able to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Maintained Buildings

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a series of exhibits depicting the most impactful events in the community’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but not both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. the director tells me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Community Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit every year, binoculars in hand, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and large parking lot – is likely to