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A brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own barrier was opened, and before their country had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started documenting their past. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Speaking to the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the path of the residents socializing in the identical inn, visiting the same religious building and placing their children to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops erected wooden posts by the brook. For a year they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces convinced them to retreat back over the stream. For a period, locals could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to show identity papers, although all understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The residents could continue to view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

It was related to me stories such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how what length of barrier they wanted to preserve. They selected a stretch on the west perimeter, near where a local resident succeeded to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the boundary was substantially fortified.

Preserved Buildings

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most impactful dates in the village’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed special permission to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the pair, in case they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but in excess of double the number persons (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director reminds me that almost all of escape attempts failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their land. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor opposed it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is likely to