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

An creek so low you hardly got your ankles wet split a settlement for over four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by evergreen groves, meadows and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started commemorating their heritage. The project is close to be completed: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not completely ready. Telling the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the same pub, visiting the very same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the whole community, creating their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The Americans persuaded them to pull back across the brook. For a time, locals could still hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were forced to display identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could continue to observe each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. A female resident was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

It was related to me accounts such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of barrier they desired to keep. They selected a section on the west edge, close to where one of their own managed to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, after which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most impactful events in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Farmers needed special permission to look after their fields; the spouse could work the combine harvester but not the two, lest they sought to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Background

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most, but over two times more persons (well over 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the big city. Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They did not supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused renewed attention.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to