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An brook so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began documenting their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the manner of the residents gathering in the identical inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the very same learning center.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Russians put up wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they took over the entire village, setting up their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, residents could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were required to present identification, although each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German local who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life building it. Locals were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to preserve. They opted for a section on the west edge, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents needed special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could use the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Background

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but over twice as many persons (well over 300) were killed seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to