Major Trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: The Tiny Village Divided in Two by the Cold War Era

A stream so low you scarcely got your feet wet split a village for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, meadows and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a partition. United States military personnel called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Months after their own wall was opened, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a group of local people started commemorating their past. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration 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 early October, but the show wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the villagers who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal separation, which pulled families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for giving all its male descendants the title Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier related to the gathering, the oddity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents gathering in the same pub, going to the very same church and sending their children to the same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the second world war. As soon as they appeared, the Soviet forces erected timber poles by the stream. For a annual period they occupied the entire community, establishing their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to withdraw back over the creek. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as restrictions increased they were obliged to display ID, even though everyone knew who they were, and to go back at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official sealing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a concrete structure was built, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The villagers could still observe each other by ascending hills, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were banned. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who said her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives like these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his occupational time developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how much structure they wanted to keep. They opted for a stretch on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a villager succeeded to escape in the middle of the night with a ladder, following which the border was heavily strengthened.

Maintained Structures

A pair of guard towers are preserved alongside a series of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the village’s past. As we walk, Lebergen lists the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Rural residents had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their fields; the spouse could operate the harvesting machine but not the two, in case they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards stood watch.

Larger Context

The border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic coast in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and documented the most frequently, but over two times more individuals (well over 300) died trying to traverse it in rural areas than in the big city. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Community Life

The majority of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or skilled workers, who accommodated to living in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They did not supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a kind of destination. Approximately 15k visited annually, optical devices in hand, to look – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after merger, Tannbach, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in renewed interest.

Current Evolutions

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and sizable parking lot – is likely to