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An stream so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was breached, and even before their nation had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers started documenting their history. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled households apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family best known for giving all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the very same inn, attending the very same church and placing their young ones to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they seized the complete village, creating their command in a house on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a period, residents could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Intensification of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was erected, with mines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the east side waving and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who wished her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard stories like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Villagers were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wanted to preserve. They chose a section on the west fringe, near where a villager succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the border was substantially fortified.

Preserved Installations

A pair of observation towers are preserved alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards were on duty.

Broader Background

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and honored the most frequently, but in excess of double the number people (more than 300) were killed trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts failed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their farms. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see every year, viewing tools in possession, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up community resembling Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and large parking lot – is probable to