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A stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by pine forests, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

A few months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people started documenting their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the villagers who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

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

Past Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the manner of the residents drinking in the identical tavern, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the same learning center.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russians put up timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the entire hamlet, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to pull back across the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as restrictions became stricter they were obliged to present identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western villager who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his professional career developing it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how much structure they desired to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian edge, near where a local resident managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most impactful events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their crops; the partner could work the agricultural equipment but never the two, lest they sought to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but over double the number people (well over 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused fresh attention.

Modern Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and large vehicle area – is likely to