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A brook so low you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of topography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people set about commemorating their past. The work is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, visiting the same religious building and placing their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians erected wooden posts by the brook. For a year they seized the whole hamlet, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to show identification, despite the fact that each person understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were banned. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western local who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me narratives including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time building it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wished to preserve. They selected a section on the west edge, near where one of their own managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are maintained in addition to a series of exhibits showing the most impactful moments in the village’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to look after their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but not the two, in case they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The border between Western Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (more than 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the urban center. the director reminds me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not supported the communist regime nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is expected to