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A stream so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of villagers began commemorating their past. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal split, which pulled households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a year they seized the complete hamlet, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations increased they were obliged to display identification, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career building it. Locals were consulted early on about how what length of structure they desired to keep. They chose a stretch on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of observation towers are maintained in addition to a collection of tableaux depicting the most dramatic events in the village’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to care for their produce; the partner could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, lest they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but more than double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor opposed it, the director states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit each year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large car park – is expected to