Major Problems in ‘Miniature Berlin’: The Tiny Village Divided in Two by the Cold War Period

A stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet split a community for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents began documenting their past. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an brutal division, which ripped households apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were observers of an cruel separation, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, attending the very same religious building and enrolling their young ones to the same learning center.

Following WWII Division

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the whole hamlet, creating their command in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans convinced them to pull back across the creek. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as controls tightened they were required to present identification, even though all understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Measures

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for replying “same to you” to a western villager who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career developing it. Locals were consulted early on about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a ladder, after which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a series of tableaux illustrating the most significant events in the community’s history. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their produce; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but never the two, in case they attempted to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most frequently, but over two times more people (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their fields. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately 15,000 came to visit every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet like Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, film screening area and sizable car park – is expected to