Big Problems in ‘Little Berlin’: The Small Village Separated in Two by the Cold War Period

A stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops called it Mini Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

A few months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel division, which ripped households into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which tore relatives asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the community spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents gathering in the identical inn, attending the identical place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the identical school.

Post-War Separation

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the brook. For a year they occupied the whole community, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers urged them to pull back across the creek. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to display identification, although all knew who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The residents could still view each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were prohibited. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a West German villager who said her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has dedicated much of his working life developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of barrier they wished to preserve. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, near where one of their own succeeded to get away in the dead of night with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of exhibits showing the most dramatic events in the village’s history. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to look after their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not the pair, for fear that they tried to flee. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but over twice as many persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They nor did they supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of site of interest. Approximately 15k came to see annually, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Modern Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, shop, film screening area and big parking lot – is probable to