THE OTHER WALL:For 33 years, Rüterberg was sealed off from the West and from their East German neighbours, writes DEREK SCALLY
ZIPPING ALONG on his scooter, East German border guard Meinhard Schmechel was almost home when he drove straight into the road block.
Narrowly avoiding the coils of barbed wire as he fell, the young man doing his military service on the border to the west was perplexed to find his village of Rüterberg cut off by a border he knew nothing about.
After West Berlin and the inner- German border, the little village of Rüterberg became a victim of its own geography in 1967.
Situated on the river Elbe on a piece of land jutting into Lower Saxony, it was surrounded on three sides by West Germany and considered by authorities in East Berlin to be a weak spot in the border. So, for 33 years, Rüterberg had the dubious distinction of being sealed off from the West on one side, and from their East German neighbours on the other.
“There was never any particular reason given for any of this, just general talk of facing down the capitalist enemy,” says Schmechel, sipping coffee on a sunny day in his garden.
Arriving into the pretty village of old redbrick houses and newer bungalows, a lonely watchtower is the only clue that this was once part of East Germany’s Sperrgebiet (exclusion zone) of high mesh fences and self- triggering machine guns.
Overnight, the Schmechels and their neighbours found themselves in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare.
They were issued with special ID cards to allow them to come and go; visitors had to apply for day passes weeks in advance and only applications from immediate relatives were likely to be considered, with no guarantee of success.
“It sounds incredible now, yet at the time, things only got more difficult in small steps,” remembers Schmechel’s wife Gisela. “You never got used to it, but you became more apathetic.”
Long before the lock-in, the authorities had been tightening the screws on Rüterberg.
In 1952 and 1961, 22 families were forcibly removed from the border village in a countrywide purge of people with large farms or businesses. These were people thought politically unreliable or too close to the church.
The expelled residents received token compensation for lost land, barely enough to start a new life, while those who remained in Rüterberg got a special border bonus payment of 50 marks a month and special supplies of fruit, cigarettes and schnapps.
As the population plunged from 450 to 170, those left behind didn’t dare complain when it was decided to seal the only gate into Rüterberg from 11pm to 5am.
Pregnant with her daughter in 1972, Gisela remembers how, when the contractions began, she called the border first before calling for an ambulance.
Contact with the West was strictly forbidden; occasionally relatives of villagers on the western side sailed down the Elbe, calling out over a megaphone greetings to easterners’ relatives.
“No one on this side dared wave,” says Gisela.
Her husband Meinhard was elected mayor of Rüterberg in 1981, a position he would hold for 24 years. Representing his neighbours, he experienced at first hand the iron determination of the authorities to retain the borders around the village.
That uncompromising attitude would prove the regime’s undoing, as Rüterbergers watched on forbidden West German television the opening of Hungary’s border to Austria.
They called a village meeting on November 8th, demanding the end of restrictions on the border to the rest of East Germany.
“We wanted to be able to have visitors without begging, we wanted an end to this restrictive existence,” said Gisela.
Borrowing from Swiss direct democracy, angry, nervous villagers voted unanimously to declare Rüterberg a “village republic” – then waited, anxiously, to see how the authorities would react.
No reaction ever came: just 24 hours later, the Berlin Wall fell and, overnight, the border to the West was redundant – after 28 years and just one successful escape.
In the following days, as their neighbours crossed the border to visit Hamburg, the Schmechels stayed behind. “We just crossed the river Elbe to see our village from the other side, then we went home again,” said Gisela.
The last two decades have gone by in a flash, she says, but one feeling has remained: the comfort of Heimat (homeland) that keeps them rooted in Rüterberg and what sustained them through the years of humiliation and frustration.
“This was our home,” says Gisela. “My family has always lived here, we had our land, our house; you don’t just leave that standing.”
After three decades under a Socialist siege, Rüterberg is growing more normal with each passing year. As the bees buzz around, the Schmechels sit in their garden, a picture of contentment.
“We have all we need here,” Meinhard Schmechel says, draining his coffee cup. “People don’t want to move away. What we experienced has welded us together. If anything, it was worth it for that.”