Serious Trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: The Minuscule Settlement Split in Two by the Cold War Era

A creek so narrow you hardly got your ankles wet separated a village for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle the Bavarian region, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was marked first by a fence and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Several months after their own division was torn down, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people began commemorating their heritage. The work is about to be completed: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the demolition of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was publicly inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel split, which tore households asunder and turned local residents into foreigners.”

“You were observers of an cruel split, which tore families into pieces and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Princely State of Reuss, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity never stood in the path of the locals gathering in the identical tavern, attending the same church and sending their children to the identical learning center.

After the War Separation

Then came the World War II. The moment they came, the Russian troops installed wooden posts by the creek. For a twelve months they took over the complete village, creating their control center in a building on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a red star. The US forces convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a period, locals could continue to hop over, though as restrictions tightened they were required to display ID, even though everyone understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Frontier Restrictions

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were forbidden. One woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a West German villager who wished her “good new year”.

Exhibition Center Establishment

I was told stories like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has devoted a large part of his working life building it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how what length of wall they wished to keep. They selected a section on the Bavarian fringe, close to where a local resident managed to escape in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was heavily fortified.

Maintained Installations

A pair of observation towers are conserved in addition to a collection of displays illustrating the most dramatic dates in the village’s chronicle. As we move, the director details the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed special permission to care for their crops; the partner could use the agricultural equipment but not the two, lest they attempted to make a run for it. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Context

The boundary between West Germany and the GDR ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but over two times more individuals (more than 300) were killed trying to cross it in rural areas than in the metropolis. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Village Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or skilled workers, who adapted to residing in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director states.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the settlement became a kind of pilgrimage. About 15,000 visited every year, binoculars in possession, to look – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village resembling Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the new museum – with a cafe, shop, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to