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A brook so shallow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

Months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began documenting their history. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely ready. Speaking to the villagers who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Background

Even at its founding in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents drinking in the very same inn, visiting the identical place of worship and sending their children to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they occupied the complete hamlet, creating their command in a house on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw across the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, even though each person knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

I was told stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Locals were consulted early on about how what length of wall they wanted to maintain. They chose a portion on the west edge, close to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the border was heavily fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 watchtowers are conserved in addition to a set of tableaux depicting the most dramatic moments in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the rules: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they tried to flee. Soldiers stood watch.

Broader Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most, but more than two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their fields. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For tourists, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit every year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed curiosity.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, movie theater and big parking lot – is expected to