Big problem in “Little Berlin”: the small village split in two due to the Cold War | Museums

A The creek is so shallow you can barely get your ankles wet in a community divided for more than four decades. By a sheer topographical coincidence, the 50 residents of Maudlarweit, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and picturesque views, found themselves in the heart of the Cold War. They had the misfortune of crossing Bavaria in western Germany and Thuringia in the east, borders that were demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it “Little Berlin.”

Months after their wall was breached, and even before their country was reunified in 1990, a group of locals set out to commemorate their history. The work is about to bear fruit: on November 9, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the (Great) Berlin Wall, the German German Museum Maudlarweit will be opened. It was officially opened by the Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not quite ready. “You have been witnesses to an inhuman division that has torn families apart and turned neighbors into foreigners,” Steinmeier said, addressing the villagers who lived through the good old days.

Even at its founding in 1810, the village straddled the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house known for giving all its male members the name Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, this strangeness never got in the way of residents drinking at the same bar, attending the same church and sending their children to the same school.

Then came World War II. Once there, the Russians set up wooden posts beside the river. For a year they controlled the entire village, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian side, which they decorated with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The Americans convinced them to withdraw from the river. For a while, villagers could still jump, although restrictions were tightened, as they were required to show ID cards, even though everyone knew who they were, and return at night.

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closure of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built filled with mines, tank traps and guard posts. Villagers could still see each other by climbing the hills, but on the eastern side waving and shouting were prohibited. A woman was put on the Nazi security service (Stasi) watchlist for replying “the same to you” to a (Bavarian) villager who wished her a “Happy New Year”.

Stories like these were told to me by Robert Liebigern, the museum’s director, who spent a large part of his working life creating it. The villagers were consulted early on about how much wall they wanted to keep. They chose a stretch on the western edge, near where someone had managed to escape in the dead of night using a ladder, and subsequently the border was significantly reinforced.

Two watchtowers have been preserved along with a series of panels depicting the most dramatic dates in the village’s history. As we walk, Lybergen lists the regulations: No one may come within 5 kilometers of the border. Farmers needed special permission to tend their crops; Either husband or wife can work the combine, but not both, in case they try to run to it. Armed guards stood watch.

The border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extends 1,400 kilometers, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the south. Berlin is remembered and commemorated the most, but more than twice as many people (over 300) died trying to cross it in rural areas than in the big city. Liebegern reminds me that 95% of escape attempts fail.

Most villagers in Mudlaruit were farmers or artisans, who adapted to living in the gray area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and tending to their fields. Liebigern explains that they neither supported nor resisted the communist regime.

As for visitors, the village has become a kind of pilgrimage. About 15 thousand people come to visit every year, binoculars in hand, to look, and then quickly leave. In 1983, the German Defense Minister was accompanied by US Vice President George Bush.

Twenty-five years after reunification, Tannbach, a television series about a fictional village similar to Maudlarweit, has led to renewed interest.

The opening of the new museum – which includes a café, shop, cinema room and large car park – is likely to provide an additional boost. Will you change the village? In any case, it changes all the time. Some of the natives died on both sides; The others have left. New arrivals have moved in, including a man from Leicestershire called Darren. His German wife, Catherine, is a traffic police officer in the Bavarian police. They live up the hill, near the chicken coop, on the Thuringia side.

The village is still divided, at least administratively, with different car numbers and postal codes. When Steinmeier visited, he was accompanied by the prime ministers of the states of Bavaria and Thuringia. When his foot crossed the river, he was formally handed over from one police force to another. History has passed. The border did not do that.