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A brook so low you hardly got your feet wet split a settlement for over four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by evergreen groves, fields and breathtaking views, 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 border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating Historical Events

A few months after their own barrier was opened, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a assembly of villagers set about memorialising their past. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Historical Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals gathering in the same pub, attending the very same place of worship and placing their children to the same learning center.

Post-War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the creek. For a year they seized the whole community, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as controls increased they were forced to present identification, even though everyone knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and calling out were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a West German local who said her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they wanted to preserve. They selected a stretch on the west fringe, near where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Preserved Structures

2 guard towers are maintained alongside a series of displays showing the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we move, the director lists the rules: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to care for their crops; the partner could use the harvesting machine but never the two, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers were on duty.

Broader Background

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the greatest, but in excess of two times more individuals (well over 300) died attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the big city. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between two political systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They nor did they supported the communist regime nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. About 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a television program about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is likely to