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A stream so shallow you barely got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own division was opened, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about commemorating their history. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Telling the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which tore families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal division, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its men the title Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their children to the very same school.

Following WWII Separation

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they appeared, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they took over the entire hamlet, setting up their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw back over the stream. For a time, residents could continue to jump across, though as controls increased they were required to show ID, although each person was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side waving and yelling were forbidden. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard stories including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how what length of wall they desired to maintain. They opted for a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved together with a set of tableaux showing the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but never the two, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Larger Background

The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but in excess of twice as many persons (more than 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their farms. They did not backed the socialist government nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a fictional community resembling Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.

Current Changes

The opening of the new museum – with a coffee shop, store, film screening area and big car park – is likely to