Big Difficulties in ‘Little Berlin’: This Small Village Split in Half by the Cold War
A stream so low you hardly got your feet wet split a community for more than four decades. Because of a chance of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, fields and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to span Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.
Commemorating History
A few months after their own division was opened, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents set about memorialising their past. The work is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was officially launched by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the beginning of October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the residents who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives apart and turned local residents into strangers.”
“You were witnesses of an brutal separation, which tore relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”
Bygone Origins
Even at its creation in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage best known for assigning all its men the title Heinrich and numbering them in order by birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the peculiarity never stood in the path of the inhabitants gathering in the very same inn, going to the identical religious building and placing their young ones to the same school.
After the War Separation
Then came the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Soviet forces installed timber poles by the creek. For a year they seized the complete community, creating their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces persuaded them to retreat back over the brook. For a while, locals could continue to jump across, though as controls tightened they were required to show identification, although all was aware who they were, and to come back at night.
Intensification of Boundary Restrictions
Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still view each other by climbing slopes, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. One woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a western local who wished her “prosperous new year”.
Exhibition Center Creation
It was related to me stories such as these tales by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his professional career developing it. Villagers were polled in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to maintain. They chose a section on the western edge, near where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, following which the border was significantly fortified.
Maintained Buildings
Two watchtowers are preserved in addition to a set of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the village’s past. As we stroll, Lebergen enumerates the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the boundary. Farmers had to obtain particular approval to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the agricultural equipment but never the pair, lest they tried to make a run for it. Military personnel were on duty.
Larger Background
The border between the Federal Republic and the East Germany ran 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is recalled and memorialised the greatest, but over double the number persons (exceeding 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.
Community Existence
Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They neither endorsed the communist regime nor resisted it, the director explains.
Interest
For tourists, however, the village became a sort of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited annually, optical devices in possession, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defense official.
25 years after reunification, Tannbach, a TV series about a fictional village like Mödlareuth, caused new attention.
Current Changes
The inauguration of the new museum – with a restaurant, boutique, film screening area and big vehicle area – is expected to