Major Difficulties in ‘Miniature Berlin’: The Minuscule Settlement Separated in Half by the Cold War Period

An brook so shallow you scarcely got your feet wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. Because of a chance of landscape, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by coniferous woods, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Mini Berlin.

Memorialising Historical Events

Several months after their own wall was opened, and even before their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents started memorialising their heritage. The effort is close to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth remembrance of the demolition of the German barrier, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will open. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the residents who experienced the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an cruel separation, which tore families asunder and turned neighbors into aliens.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives into pieces and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Princely State of Reuss, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the same inn, attending the very same religious building and enrolling their children to the very same school.

After the War Separation

Then came the global conflict. As soon as they appeared, the Russian troops installed timber poles by the stream. For a year they seized the entire village, setting up their control center in a building on the western side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to withdraw across the creek. For a period, locals could continue to cross over, though as limitations tightened they were forced to show identity papers, although everyone was aware who they were, and to go back at night.

Escalation of Border Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came metal barriers and the legal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could continue to view each other by scaling slopes, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was put on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “back at you” to a western local who wished her “good new year”.

Museum Creation

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent a large part of his occupational time building it. Residents were polled early on about how how long a section barrier they wanted to maintain. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where a local resident succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the boundary was heavily fortified.

Preserved Structures

A pair of watchtowers are preserved together with a collection of exhibits depicting the most significant events in the community’s past. As we move, the director enumerates the restrictions: nobody could get closer than 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to care for their fields; the partner could operate the harvesting machine but never the pair, lest they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.

Wider Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the GDR ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is commemorated and memorialised the most, but more than double the number persons (well over 300) were killed trying to pass over it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Village Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who accommodated to residing in the ambiguous area between 2 ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their fields. They nor did they endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Lebegern states.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a sort of pilgrimage. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in their hands, to look – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a television program about a made-up village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and sizable parking lot – is likely to