Serious Trouble in ‘Tiny Berlin’: The Tiny Village Split in Half by the Cold War Era

A brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades. Because of a chance of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. US troops dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own wall was breached, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of villagers started documenting their past. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was officially launched by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the exhibition was not entirely prepared. Telling the residents who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel split, which pulled households asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Bygone Context

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and counting them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the locals drinking in the identical pub, going to the same church and sending their kids to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they came, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a twelve months they occupied the entire village, establishing their control center in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the stream. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls tightened they were required to show identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Boundary Measures

After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a barrier was constructed, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The locals could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a western local who greeted her “good new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me stories including these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his working life developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how much structure they desired to keep. They chose a portion on the western perimeter, close to where a local resident was able to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the frontier was significantly fortified.

Conserved Buildings

Two guard towers are preserved together with a series of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen details the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to look after their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but never the pair, lest they sought to flee. Soldiers were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the most, but in excess of double the number individuals (well over 300) were killed seeking to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts were unsuccessful.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and caring for their fields. They neither supported the East German authorities nor fought it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. About 15k came to visit each year, optical devices in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a television program about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in new attention.

Present-Day Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and sizable parking lot – is likely to