Big Difficulties in ‘Miniature Berlin’: This Tiny Settlement Divided in Two by the Cold War

An brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Due to a quirk of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by pine forests, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Mini Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own wall was breached, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers set about memorialising their heritage. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which pulled families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which tore relatives apart and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Origins

Even at its founding in 1810, the community straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family most famous for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the path of the locals socializing in the same tavern, attending the identical religious building and enrolling their young ones to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the global conflict. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a year they occupied the complete community, setting up their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces urged them to pull back across the brook. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were required to present identity papers, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to go back at after dark.

Intensification of Boundary Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, tank traps and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side signaling and shouting were banned. A local woman was placed on a Stasi watch list for replying “likewise” to a Bavarian villager who wished her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his working life developing it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they desired to keep. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian edge, adjacent to where one of their own was able to flee in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are conserved in addition to a series of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic dates in the village’s past. As we walk, the director details the regulations: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to tend to their produce; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never the pair, in case they sought to flee. Armed guards kept guard.

Larger Context

The border between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but more than twice as many people (more than 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They nor did they supported the socialist government nor fought it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed attention.

Present-Day Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, movie theater and big vehicle area – is expected to