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A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet separated a village for over four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving History

A few months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a collection of local people started documenting their past. The project is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore households apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for giving all its men the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they came, the Soviet forces put up timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole community, creating their command in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identity papers, although all understood who they were, and to come back at evening.

Escalation of Border Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by scaling hills, but on the east side signaling and shouting were banned. A female resident was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wanted to preserve. They opted for a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager was able to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are preserved together with a set of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain particular approval to look after their crops; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The border between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) died attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. the director informs me that almost all of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a television program about a made-up community similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in new curiosity.

Current Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, movie theater and sizable vehicle area – is expected to