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A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was opened, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers began memorialising their heritage. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel division, which tore families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the very same tavern, going to the identical religious building and placing their kids to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians erected timber poles by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the entire hamlet, setting up their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were forced to show ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

It was related to me stories including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life building it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to keep. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, near where a villager managed to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

2 guard towers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux depicting the most significant events in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director enumerates the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed special permission to look after their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany extended 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) were killed attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two political systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For visitors, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is likely to