Major Trouble in ‘Miniature Berlin’: This Minuscule Hamlet Divided in Two by the Cold War

A brook so low you hardly got your ankles wet divided a village for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet encircled by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Months after their own wall was breached, and before their state had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was formally opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who experienced the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an brutal split, which ripped households asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which pulled relatives asunder and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Starting at its creation in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most famous for giving all its male members the designation Heinrich and counting them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the crowd, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the locals socializing in the same tavern, visiting the identical place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same learning center.

Post-War Separation

Then came the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops put up timber poles by the brook. For a year they seized the whole village, creating their command in a house on the Bavarian side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to withdraw to the other side of the creek. For a period, locals could still jump across, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to show identification, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Escalation of Boundary Measures

Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still view each other by climbing hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and shouting were prohibited. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a Bavarian resident who greeted her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Creation

It was related to me accounts including these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted much of his working life developing it. Locals were polled early on about how what length of barrier they desired to preserve. They opted for a section on the west edge, near where a local resident succeeded to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Conserved Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a collection of displays illustrating the most significant dates in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen details the rules: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed special permission to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but never the two, for fear that they sought to escape. Soldiers kept guard.

Wider Context

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and honored the greatest, but in excess of twice as many persons (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Village Daily Living

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or skilled workers, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, the director states.

Interest

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Roughly 15,000 came to see every year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then rapidly leave. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, the TV show, a broadcast production about a imaginary community similar to Mödlareuth, caused fresh curiosity.

Current Changes

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and large car park – is likely to