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A stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet split a community for in excess of four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

Several months after their own division was opened, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents began memorialising their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Speaking to the villagers who experienced the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk never stood in the way of the residents gathering in the same pub, visiting the same place of worship and sending their children to the same school.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they seized the entire hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as limitations increased they were forced to display identity papers, although all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and calling out were prohibited. One woman was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a western local who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Locals were polled early on about how what length of wall they wished to maintain. They selected a portion on the west edge, close to where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the village’s history. As we move, the director lists the restrictions: no one could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but not both, in case they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but more than twice as many individuals (well over 300) died seeking to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not backed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Roughly 15k came to see each year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to new attention.

Modern Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is probable to