Major Problems in ‘Tiny Berlin’: This Minuscule Village Separated in Two by the Cold War Period

An brook so low you barely got your feet wet divided a community for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, fields and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers nicknamed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was torn down, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of local people set about commemorating their history. The effort is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an brutal split, which tore families into pieces and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for giving all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the path of the locals drinking in the identical pub, attending the same religious building and placing their children to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. The moment they appeared, the Russians installed wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they occupied the whole community, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a red star. The US forces urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a while, villagers could still hop over, though as restrictions increased they were forced to display ID, even though each person understood who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by scaling slopes, but on the eastern side waving and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German villager who greeted her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

It was related to me stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life creating it. Residents were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the western edge, near where a local resident managed to escape in the dead of night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved together with a set of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Farmers needed specific authorization to look after their crops; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the two, for fear that they attempted to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Context

The frontier between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but in excess of two times more people (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95% of efforts to cross were unsuccessful.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not supported the socialist government nor resisted it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a sort of site of interest. Approximately 15k visited annually, optical devices in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh attention.

Current Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big car park – is likely to