July 4, 2023
The one-day republic
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LENZEN - It's a funny world. It never turns out as you thought.
Rüterberg is just another of those villages on the Elbe, spared for some reason from being cleared out and demolished because it stood on the border.
There's little reason to stop. Rüterberg has neither a shop nor a restaurant, and nowhere to stay. And anyway it was coming on for rain.
But there are reasons to linger. Back in the day, you see, Rüterberg had the river on one side, as it still has now, and a fence around the other. The effect was not so much to keep out imperialists from the West as to keep Rüterberg out of the DDR. It had become an exclave, a place where residents had to show papers to enter their own country.
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This, of course, became wearing. Either the place was in the DDR or it wasn't.
The mayor asked Berlin for permission to hold a village meeting. Berlin, not knowing what would happen next, agreed. And what happened next was that Rüterberg declared itself independent.
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This, it should be stressed, was no joke. Almost all the village was there and barely anyone objected. The mayor had prepared papers of separation and the villagers signed them to send to Berlin. Their legal submission quoted case law and historical precedent, even if that historical precedent was in Switzerland.
Not everyone was confident, of course. There were real fears of tanks on the lawn by the morrow, of citizens hauled from beds at dawn, never to be seen again.
Next day, therefore, they listened nervously to their radios. There wasn't a word about their revolution. Instead, the news was of how the wall had fallen, of how East Germans were now free to travel to the West.
The Rüterberg Revolution had lasted a day and nobody had taken any notice.
The people there still mark the day they stood up to the forces of communism. They still fly the flag they prepared. And they still have remnants of the fence that once excluded them from their own country.
They are a proud people in the Independent Republic of Rüterberg.
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