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A creek so low you barely got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades of time. By an accident of landscape, the fifty residents of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a barrier and then by a wall. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Preserving the Past

A few months after their own division was torn down, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people started memorialising their history. The work is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Telling the residents who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped households apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Past Background

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Royal Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the locals drinking in the identical tavern, visiting the identical church and enrolling their children to the identical school.

After the War Split

Then came the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the complete hamlet, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back across the stream. For a period, residents could continue to cross over, though as limitations tightened they were obliged to show identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The residents could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side waving and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a Stasi monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who said her “prosperous new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

I heard narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated a large part of his working life building it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a stretch on the western perimeter, close to where one of their own succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director lists the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, in case they tried to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but more than double the number persons (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director informs me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adapted to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They did not backed the East German authorities nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to new curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and sizable car park – is expected to