Serious Trouble in ‘Miniature Berlin’: The Minuscule Hamlet Split in Two by the Cold War

A brook so narrow you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

Months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of local people started memorialising their past. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the oddity never stood in the manner of the inhabitants socializing in the identical pub, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the same school.

Following WWII Division

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they arrived, the Russians installed wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they took over the complete village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the stream. For a time, residents could still hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to show identification, even though everyone understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his working life creating it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a section on the western perimeter, near where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 guard towers are maintained in addition to a set of exhibits illustrating the most significant moments in the community’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: not a single person could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to look after their produce; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they attempted to escape. Soldiers stood watch.

Larger Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but over double the number people (exceeding 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in rural areas than in the urban center. the director informs me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Current Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, boutique, film screening area and sizable vehicle area – is probable to