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An creek so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show was not completely ready. Speaking to the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an cruel split, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house best known for giving all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the identical inn, attending the identical church and placing their kids to the same school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces installed wood stakes by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the entire community, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to retreat back over the creek. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as limitations increased they were required to display ID, although everyone understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The residents could continue to see each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were banned. One woman was added to a East German secret police watch list for answering “likewise” to a West German local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life building it. Villagers were asked early on about how much wall they desired to maintain. They selected a section on the western edge, close to where one of their own was able to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a set of exhibits depicting the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their crops; the partner could use the combine harvester but not the two, for fear that they sought to escape. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) died trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They nor did they backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of destination. Approximately 15,000 came to see annually, optical devices in possession, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and big car park – is probable to