Major Trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: This Small Settlement Split in Two by the Cold War

A creek so low you hardly got your feet wet divided a settlement for more than four decades. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

A few months after their own division was opened, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of local people began memorialising their past. The work is soon to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the fall of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display was not entirely prepared. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal split, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the community cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for bestowing all its male descendants the name Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the quirk did not stand in the path of the residents socializing in the very same tavern, visiting the same church and sending their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Post-War Split

Then came the World War II. The moment they came, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they occupied the whole community, establishing their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the brook. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as limitations increased they were forced to show ID, although each person was aware who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Border Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The locals could still see each other by climbing elevations, but on the east side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for replying “back at you” to a western local who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Establishment

I heard narratives such as these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a significant portion of his working life building it. Villagers were asked in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to keep. They selected a section on the west perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a scaling tool, following which the boundary was heavily strengthened.

Conserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are preserved alongside a series of displays showing the most significant moments in the village’s chronicle. As we stroll, the director details the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Rural residents needed specific authorization to tend to their crops; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances both, for fear that they tried to escape. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the East Germany extended nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the north to here in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to pass over it in countryside regions than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Community Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s residents were agricultural workers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and caring for their land. They did not backed the socialist government nor resisted it, the director states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. Roughly fifteen thousand came to see each year, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then quickly depart. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.

25 years after merger, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh curiosity.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large car park – is likely to