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An stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, pastures and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The project is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which ripped households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the path of the locals drinking in the very same inn, visiting the identical religious building and placing their children to the identical learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they took over the whole hamlet, establishing their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw back over the brook. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to present identity papers, although each person understood who they were, and to come back at night.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could continue to see each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and yelling were banned. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a western resident who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much structure they wished to preserve. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, near where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Installations

A pair of observation towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the village’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: no one could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the partner could use the combine harvester but never the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the greatest, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They nor did they supported the communist regime nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit every year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to