Major Problems in ‘Tiny Berlin’: The Tiny Hamlet Separated in Half by the Cold War Era

An stream so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet split a village for more than four decades of time. By an accident of geography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, fields and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a border that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Months after their own division was opened, and prior to their state had reunified in 1990, a assembly of residents set about commemorating their past. The project is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was publicly opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Telling the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an inhuman split, which pulled families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel division, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the village straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier informed the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals gathering in the very same tavern, attending the identical place of worship and sending their kids to the identical educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Next arrived the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they took over the complete community, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans persuaded them to pull back across the creek. For a while, residents could still hop over, though as restrictions increased they were required to show ID, despite the fact that all understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.

Escalation of Boundary Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with mines, tank traps and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the Soviet side waving and yelling were prohibited. A local woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a West German resident who said her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

It was related to me stories like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how much barrier they wanted to keep. They selected a portion on the west edge, near where one of their own succeeded to escape in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the boundary was substantially reinforced.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a set of tableaux depicting the most significant dates in the community’s past. As we walk, the director enumerates the rules: nobody could get closer than 5km of the border. Rural residents had to obtain particular approval to care for their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Broader Background

The border between West Germany and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but over two times more people (more than 300) were killed attempting to traverse it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between two political systems by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They neither supported the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to see every year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, the television series, a TV series about a made-up hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, store, cinema room and large parking lot – is likely to