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An brook so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, fields and stunning views, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started memorialising their history. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely finished. Speaking to the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which tore households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the village spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the way of the locals drinking in the identical pub, going to the very same church and sending their kids to the same learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops put up wood stakes by the brook. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to present identity papers, even though all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Increase of Boundary Controls

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was constructed, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was put on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a Bavarian local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his professional career creating it. Villagers were asked early on about how what length of barrier they desired to keep. They chose a section on the western fringe, near where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Installations

2 watchtowers are maintained in addition to a set of displays illustrating the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed special permission to care for their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, lest they sought to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Context

The border between West Germany and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but in excess of two times more people (exceeding 300) died trying to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit each year, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Developments

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is expected to