Major Difficulties in ‘Miniature Berlin’: This Minuscule Village Separated in Half by the Cold War Era

An stream so narrow you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village encircled by pine forests, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the core of the Cold War conflict. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own division was breached, and prior to their nation had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started memorialising their past. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally opened by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an brutal division, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the very same tavern, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their children to the same educational institution.

Post-War Division

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a year they seized the whole community, setting up their control center in a dwelling on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans convinced them to retreat back over the creek. For a period, locals could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were forced to present ID, even though each person knew who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The locals could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side signaling and yelling were forbidden. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “back at you” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Creation

I heard narratives such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has devoted a large part of his professional career building it. Locals were polled early on about how how long a section wall they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the western edge, adjacent to where a villager managed to get away in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the boundary was significantly strengthened.

Maintained Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed particular approval to tend to their crops; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but not the two, for fear that they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Larger Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited every year, viewing tools in hand, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after merger, the TV show, a broadcast production about a made-up village like Mödlareuth, caused new curiosity.

Current Changes

The launch of the recently established museum – with a cafe, store, cinema room and big car park – is probable to