Serious Difficulties in ‘Tiny Berlin’: The Tiny Settlement Divided in Two by the Cold War Period

An stream so low you scarcely got your ankles wet divided a community for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by evergreen groves, meadows and breathtaking scenery, found themselves at the center of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Preserving History

Several months after their own wall was opened, and prior to their state had become one in 1990, a assembly of local people began memorialising their history. The effort is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the German barrier, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely finished. Speaking to the locals who lived through the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which pulled relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

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

Bygone Origins

Starting at its establishment in 1810, the community straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a princely house best known for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity did not stand in the manner of the residents socializing in the very same pub, attending the same church and placing their young ones to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Russians installed timber poles by the creek. For a twelve months they seized the whole hamlet, establishing their command in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the stream. For a time, villagers could still cross over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display identity papers, even though each person understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was built, with landmines, tank traps and watchtowers. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the Soviet side gesturing and yelling were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who said her “happy new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told accounts such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a large part of his working life developing it. Residents were polled early on about how much structure they wished to maintain. They chose a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to get away in the dead of night with a scaling tool, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Maintained Structures

2 guard towers are conserved together with a series of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we walk, Lebergen enumerates the rules: not a single person could get closer than 5km of the frontier. Farmers required specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they attempted to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and documented the greatest, but over double the number people (well over 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the urban center. the director tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adapted to living in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and tending to their farms. They did not backed the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a sort of site of interest. About fifteen thousand came to visit annually, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then swiftly depart. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

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

Current Evolutions

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, movie theater and big car park – is probable to