Big Trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: This Tiny Settlement Separated in Half by the Cold War

A creek so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Addressing the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore households into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the residents drinking in the identical inn, attending the very same religious building and placing their young ones to the same school.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they came, the Russians installed wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the entire community, establishing their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw across the brook. For a time, villagers could continue to hop over, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to show identity papers, despite the fact that each person knew who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Escalation of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side waving and yelling were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for replying “likewise” to a western local who greeted her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted much of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled early on about how what length of wall they wished to preserve. They chose a portion on the Bavarian fringe, close to where one of their own managed to get away in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Preserved Installations

2 observation towers are conserved in addition to a collection of tableaux illustrating the most impactful dates in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required particular approval to tend to their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they sought to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany ran nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is remembered and documented the greatest, but over two times more people (well over 300) died attempting to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their farms. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor fought it, Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand visited every year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to