Major Trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: The Tiny Hamlet Separated in Two by the Cold War Era
A stream so low you hardly got your feet wet separated a village for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of landscape, the 50 residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and stunning scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.
Memorialising History
Several months after their own wall was breached, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a assembly of local people started documenting their heritage. The work is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally opened by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show was not completely ready. Addressing the residents who endured the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”
“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore households apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”
Historical Background
Even at its establishment in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and labeling them in order by birth. As Steinmeier informed the gathering, the oddity did not stand in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, visiting the identical religious building and placing their kids to the same school.
After the War Split
Next arrived the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wood stakes by the brook. For a annual period they seized the whole community, establishing their headquarters in a house on the western side, decorating it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a time, residents could still cross over, though as restrictions became stricter they were forced to display identity papers, although everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at night.
Increase of Boundary Controls
After that, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The residents could continue to observe each other by climbing hills, but on the eastern side signaling and yelling were prohibited. A female resident was added to a Stasi monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a West German resident who greeted her “good new year”.
Museum Creation
It was related to me accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his professional career creating it. Locals were polled early on about how much wall they wished to preserve. They opted for a section on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the border was heavily strengthened.
Preserved Installations
Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a series of tableaux showing the most dramatic events in the village’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: no one could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers needed specific authorization to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances the pair, lest they tried to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.
Wider Context
The boundary between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most frequently, but more than double the number individuals (more than 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in rural areas than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that almost all of escape attempts were unsuccessful.
Community Existence
Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or skilled workers, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and tending to their fields. They nor did they endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.
Visitors
For visitors, however, the village became a type of site of interest. About 15k came to see annually, binoculars in hand, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.
Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a fictional community similar to Mödlareuth, caused new attention.
Modern Developments
The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, boutique, cinema room and large parking lot – is probable to