Major Difficulties in ‘Tiny Berlin’: This Tiny Village Divided in Two by the Cold War Era
An brook so narrow you scarcely got your ankles wet split a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, fields and stunning vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a border that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.
Preserving History
A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and prior to their country had reunified in 1990, a group of villagers began documenting their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not entirely ready. Telling the villagers who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an inhuman split, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”
“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped relatives asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”
Past Background
Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most renowned for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth order. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk never stood in the path of the locals drinking in the very same inn, visiting the same religious building and placing their kids to the same educational institution.
Post-War Separation
Subsequently occurred the second world war. As soon as they came, the Russians erected timber poles by the stream. For a year they took over the complete village, creating their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to withdraw across the brook. For a while, locals could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were forced to display ID, even though everyone understood who they were, and to come back at after dark.
Intensification of Boundary Restrictions
Then, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was constructed, with landmines, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still observe each other by scaling slopes, but on the Soviet side signaling and yelling were banned. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for responding “same to you” to a western resident who said her “happy new year”.
Heritage Site Creation
I was told accounts like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life building it. Residents were polled in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wished to preserve. They selected a portion on the Bavarian perimeter, close to where a villager managed to flee in the darkest hours with a climbing device, subsequently the frontier was heavily fortified.
Conserved Installations
Two observation towers are conserved in addition to a set of exhibits depicting the most significant events in the community’s history. As we stroll, Lebergen lists the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the border. Rural residents required specific authorization to care for their produce; the husband or wife could use the harvesting machine but not both, for fear that they sought to flee. Armed guards stood watch.
Wider Background
The frontier between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and memorialised the greatest, but more than twice as many persons (exceeding 300) were killed trying to cross it in rural areas than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts failed.
Village Existence
The majority of Mödlareuth’s residents were rural laborers or skilled workers, who accommodated to dwelling in the grey zone between two ideological spheres by staying low-profile and looking after their land. They did not supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern states.
Interest
For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15k visited each year, optical devices in hand, to look – and then rapidly depart. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.
25 years after reunification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, led to renewed curiosity.
Modern Evolutions
The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and sizable car park – is expected to
