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An stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers began commemorating their heritage. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the locals gathering in the very same inn, attending the same religious building and sending their kids to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they came, the Russian troops erected wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, creating their control center in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were required to present ID, although each person was aware who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could continue to observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a western local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I was told narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a significant portion of his working life developing it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, near where a villager managed to get away in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was substantially fortified.

Maintained Installations

2 observation towers are conserved together with a set of tableaux showing the most significant moments in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, Robert Lebegern details the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to care for their produce; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, in case they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Context

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the greatest, but over double the number people (well over 300) died seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of attempts to flee failed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or craftsmen, who accommodated to residing in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up village similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, cinema room and big vehicle area – is expected to