Serious Trouble in ‘Miniature Berlin’: This Minuscule Settlement Split in Two by the Cold War Era

An stream so low you scarcely got your ankles wet split a settlement for in excess of four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was established first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents started commemorating their history. The project is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely finished. Telling the locals who endured the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an brutal split, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an inhuman split, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Context

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them consecutively by birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the residents socializing in the same inn, going to the very same religious building and placing their children to the identical educational institution.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, establishing their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers urged them to retreat back over the brook. For a period, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were required to show identification, even though all knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the Soviet side signaling and shouting were forbidden. One woman was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a Bavarian local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a large part of his professional career developing it. Locals were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to preserve. They chose a section on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager managed to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, after which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Maintained Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved in addition to a series of tableaux illustrating the most dramatic events in the village’s past. As we stroll, the director details the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Rural residents required specific authorization to look after their fields; the spouse could use the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, in case they tried to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between West Germany and the GDR stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but in excess of two times more persons (well over 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that 95% of escape attempts failed.

Village Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director clarifies.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k came to see every year, viewing tools in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after unification, the television series, a television program about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, caused renewed curiosity.

Modern Changes

The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and large car park – is likely to