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A creek so low you barely got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was opened, and prior to their country had become one in 1990, a collection of villagers began memorialising their history. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Historical Origins

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community straddled the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the same tavern, attending the identical church and enrolling their children to the identical learning center.

After the War Division

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the entire hamlet, creating their command in a dwelling on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back across the brook. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were obliged to present identity papers, even though each person knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Increase of Border Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian local who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his working life developing it. Villagers were consulted early on about how what length of structure they wished to maintain. They chose a section on the Bavarian edge, close to where a local resident managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was heavily fortified.

Conserved Buildings

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we walk, the director enumerates the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the border. Farmers needed specific authorization to look after their produce; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they sought to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) were killed trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the settlement became a sort of destination. About fifteen thousand came to visit each year, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a fictional village similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and big vehicle area – is probable to