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An stream so low you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their heritage. The work is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Speaking to the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel division, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which tore households into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Background

Starting at its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk was never an obstacle in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the very same tavern, visiting the identical place of worship and placing their children to the identical school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a year they took over the whole village, setting up their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to retreat across the brook. For a period, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display ID, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Border Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could continue to see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was added to a East German secret police surveillance list for replying “likewise” to a western resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

It was related to me accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his occupational time creating it. Residents were consulted early on about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a villager managed to flee in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved together with a set of displays depicting the most significant moments in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen details the regulations: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but not the pair, in case they tried to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Background

The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but in excess of two times more individuals (exceeding 300) died trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two political systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They neither backed the communist regime nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of destination. About 15k visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, store, film screening area and big car park – is likely to