Major Difficulties in ‘Tiny Berlin’: This Tiny Settlement Separated in Two by the Cold War Era
A creek so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for more than four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by coniferous woods, fields and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.
Memorialising the Past
Months after their own wall was opened, and before their nation had unified again in 1990, a group of local people began memorialising their history. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Addressing the villagers who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
“You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”
Bygone Background
Right from its establishment in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the inhabitants gathering in the very same pub, visiting the same church and placing their children to the very same school.
After the War Split
Subsequently occurred the global conflict. As soon as they arrived, the Russians installed wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they seized the entire village, creating their control center in a building on the western side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The US forces persuaded them to withdraw across the creek. For a while, residents could continue to jump across, though as restrictions increased they were forced to show identity papers, although each person understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.
Intensification of Border Measures
Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, tank traps and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for answering “likewise” to a Bavarian local who greeted her “prosperous new year”.
Heritage Site Establishment
I was told accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a significant portion of his occupational time developing it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of structure they wished to keep. They chose a section on the west edge, close to where one of their own succeeded to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the frontier was heavily fortified.
Conserved Buildings
Two watchtowers are conserved in addition to a collection of exhibits showing the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern details the regulations: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their produce; the husband or wife could operate the agricultural equipment but never the two, in case they sought to flee. Soldiers stood watch.
Wider Background
The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over double the number persons (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.
Community Daily Living
The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adapted to dwelling in the grey zone between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They neither supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.
Tourism
For tourists, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to visit annually, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.
25 years after reunification, the television series, a television program about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to new attention.
Current Changes
The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and large car park – is expected to
