Big Difficulties in ‘Miniature Berlin’: This Tiny Settlement Divided in Half by the Cold War

A stream so low you barely got your feet wet split a community for in excess of four decades. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people started memorialising their history. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which pulled households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Historical Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male descendants the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the quirk never stood in the way of the residents gathering in the same pub, going to the same church and placing their kids to the same school.

After the War Split

Next arrived the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces installed wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a time, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to show identification, although everyone was aware who they were, and to come back at evening.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with explosives, vehicle barriers and observation points. The villagers could still view each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for replying “likewise” to a West German local who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Locals were asked early on about how what length of barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the west perimeter, close to where a villager was able to escape in the middle of the night with a climbing device, subsequently the border was substantially fortified.

Preserved Buildings

2 observation towers are maintained together with a series of tableaux showing the most significant events in the community’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to care for their produce; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, in case they attempted to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but over double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed attempting to cross it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95% of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. About 15,000 visited every year, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and big parking lot – is expected to