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A brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people set about documenting their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled households apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the residents gathering in the very same tavern, attending the same church and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Then came the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the whole village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces convinced them to retreat across the stream. For a while, locals could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were obliged to show identification, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to go back at evening.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I was told narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a significant portion of his working life building it. Locals were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits showing the most impactful moments in the village’s history. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to care for their crops; the partner could work the combine harvester but never both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. the director reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and big parking lot – is expected to