Big Problems in ‘Tiny Berlin’: The Minuscule Village Divided in Half by the Cold War

An creek so shallow you scarcely got your ankles wet separated a village for over four decades. Due to a quirk of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a barrier and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely prepared. Addressing the locals who endured the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an brutal division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house most famous for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the very same pub, going to the very same religious building and sending their children to the same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the stream. For a year they took over the entire hamlet, establishing their headquarters in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, villagers could continue to cross over, though as controls increased they were required to show identity papers, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could continue to view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and calling out were banned. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

It was related to me narratives such as these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career creating it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wished to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the west edge, near where a villager succeeded to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the border was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Installations

A pair of guard towers are preserved together with a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s past. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the rules: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain special permission to care for their crops; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but not the pair, for fear that they attempted to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but in excess of two times more people (exceeding 300) lost their lives seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to residing in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by keeping their heads down and tending to their farms. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor opposed it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the village became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to visit annually, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Current Developments

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and big vehicle area – is probable to