ONE EUROPE 10 YEARS LATER

The article orginally published on the front page of the Nov. 7, 1999, New York Times is a part of a series examining Europe a decade after the fall of the Berling Wall. Previous articles have looked at Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who helped bring down the wall, as well as the troubles that unification has brought to Germany and the shifting relationships between Eastern European countries 10 years after the fall of Communism.

On March 15, 1960, an 18-year-old German girl and her younger brother boarded a train here to escape East German Communism for the West. But the police were patrolling and the girl, convinced they could not make it together, pushed the boy off the train as it started to move.

"Police were asking me who I was, where I was going, why I was traveling, and I realized we were too suspicious as a pair," said Heidi Boettcher, now an American citizen. "My brother was just 16. I was sure he would join me later." But the nudge that left the boy, Hans Schulz-Netzer, marooned at Wittenberg station 17 months before the Berlin Wall went up led to permanently divided lives. One has long lived in the Soviet bloc, the other in rural Missouri. By the time the wall fell a decade ago, Hans and Heidi stood at opposite poles in the basic post-cold-war debate of Western societies.That debate no longer concerns the merits of capitalism, a system without ideological rival since Communism collapsed. Rather, it centers on the differing European and American views of how far capitalism should be regulated in order to cushion people from the harshness of market forces.A German without job prospects, Hans favors enveloping social protection. An American with a convert's zeal, Heidi wants "the government out of my face." Hans sees his sister as "way over to the political right." Heidi views her brother as the victim of a German system "that still assumes people are so dumb they need to be taken care of." German unification without German neutrality was a great Western achievement, but the economic toll was also great. Over the past decade, the decision to extend state pensions, unemployment benefits and all West Germany's social programs to 17 million new citizens has precipitated a crisis in Europe's largest welfare state.Put simply, a once envied "social market" model is now carrying more weight than it can bear. Mr. Schulz-Netzer, 56, is part of the burden. He has been collecting about $825 a month in unemployment benefits for the past two years. His wife, Karin, 55, gets another $600. Karin's daughter, also unemployed, receives some more.That money has to come from somewhere, free lunches being as scarce in Germany as anywhere else. The taxes and charges needed to finance all the social cushioning have pushed up wage costs and so deterred hiring. Long Europe's engine, Germany has stalled, unable to dent 10 percent unemployment.This crisis does not surprise Mrs. Boettcher, 58, who is married to a farmer in Missouri, a state with a 4 percent unemployment rate. "If you want to work, I don't give a damn, you find work," she said, laughing. "But Germans are sheep. Why should my brother think for himself if money is being thrown at him?" Having raised 11 children since arriving in the United States in 1961, she has now started a small business a day nursery for infants. Charging a daily rate of $11 a child and on the move from morning to night, she makes a little more than her brother's family receives from the German state for doing nothing.It is tempting to see in Mrs. Boettcher's dynamism and her German brother's passivity facile symbols of American vitality and German self-doubt, of the vigor of the New World and late middle age of the Old. But the divisions of the post-cold-war era are more nuanced than that.Germans in general reject unmitigated "Americanization"; if that is the sum of cold war victory, they tend to say, no thanks. To the millions of American jobs created this decade, some remany has free health care, free universities, smaller prison populations, no homeless: capitalism tempered by equity."We could benefit a lot by being more American," said Norbert Walter, chief economist for Deutsche Bank. "We should apply the market economy instead of being a museum of Western socialism. But Americans only need to take a look at their inner cities to see they might also learn a little from Europe." A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this debate is coming to a boil. Time has run out; Finance Minister Hans Eichel said recently that the German model was "finished." But a look at the lives of Heidi Boettcher, American immigrant, and her brother suggests that trans-Atlantic accord will prove elusive on how much state-directed compassion global capitalism needs.The Right Qualities For Assimilation Germans make good Americans. Between 1820 and 1996, 7.1 million Germans immigrated to the United States more than from any other nation. The desire to forget an often painful past, honesty and thoroughness, a practical bent many Germans share these qualities, and they have made absorption easier.Certainly Mrs. Boettcher looks the part. With one infant on her back, another in her arms, she exudes a ready friendliness that speaks of 38 American years. Her manner is easygoing to the point that even 10 children under 4 in her new home in Altenburg, Mo. (population 256) seem manageable.So the darkness of the story she tells punctuated by the contented squeals of little Americans is doubly shocking.Like many Germans of her generation, Heidi grew up fatherless. Like most Germans, she suffered. Her father, Karl Schulz-Netzer, was captured by the Americans and held in St. Louis. On his return to Germany after the war, he filed for divorce.Her parents and her country split at the same time. Age 4 when the war ended in 1945, Heidi fell into the Communist world. She recalls her mother cutting up a blanket to make pants for her and her brother. The garden yielded bare subsistence.Living in a rural area, she saw Communist doctrine at work. Land was taken over by the state, farmers put to work eight hours a day and granted a month's vacation. But holidays were scant compensation for expropriation.Wheat sometimes grew "to the ceiling" because nobody could be bothered to harvest it, she recalls. A first lesson in Communism's effect on motivation: nobody wants to herd the state's sheep.Care packages sent from the United States by distant cousins, the Degenhardts, provided the only relief. The family had emigrated to Missouri in the 1870's. For the young girl, sweet Hershey bars and succulent lard constituted America's first lure.A good athlete, Heidi was sent at 17 to the German high school of physical culture in Leipzig, training ground for many East German Olympic gold medalists. In this palace of high socialism, indoctrination moved into high gear. But Heidi was more marked by rationing than revolution. If the latter produced the former, how good could it be? "When I turned 18," she said, "I was nominated to join the party. It was, of course, the greatest honor. The only problem was, I didn't believe in Communism. I'd already decided it works fine on paper, but in reality people need incentives." Her own incentive became escape. With the Berlin Wall not yet built in 1960 it would go up the next year thousands were leaving every week. It was enough to get to Berlin and board a subway to a Western sector. But movement into the capital was tightly controlled.At the end of a vacation at home in Teuchel, an outlying district of Wittenberg, Heidi feigned sickness to put off return to school and decided to take a train to Berlin, a little over an hour away. She went to the station with her little brother, Hans, who kept saying that he wanted to go with her.They boarded the train; Hans, she recalls, clung to her. But he was only 16, without qualifications, and, seeing the police, she urged him to get off. In the end she had to prod him as the train lurched forward."I thought I'd never make it," she said, "and I was already wondering what prison would be like. The police cornered me between two cars and kept grilling me. And then, for the first time in a long time, I thought of my father." A visit to her long-lost father: that was the reason for her journey to Berlin. An older policeman about her father's age listened to the girl's story of estrangement. How she wanted to see her dad now after so many years. Then, abruptly, after 45 minutes, he smiled and ordered the interrogation ended, saying, "Have a nice trip." The voyage would be long. It took her, that night, to West Berlin: a first Coke, refugee camps, her first 10 West German marks for giving blood. On to Hanover, then Bavaria, and training as a nurse.Freedom was real; it was also lonely. She wrote to the Degenhardts, who invited her to join them in Missouri. The Berlin Wall had gone up in August 1961. A few weeks later, on Sept. 22, she flew to the United States.Her road took her from Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, to Wittenberg, Mo., where the Degenhardts lived. It was one long traveled by Germans. The American Wittenberg was founded in 1839 by about 700 Lutherans who sailed to the United States after leaving the town where Martin Luther nailed his explosive theses to the church door.Wittenberg, on the banks of the Mississippi, is now a ghost town, destroyed in the flood of 1993. But in Altenburg, a parish founded at the same time on higher ground, all is neatly ordered around the Lutheran church. Boxes contain pretty floral arrangements and American-flag pennants.In this area, in a tightknit, church-dominated community, Heidi quickly felt at home. What struck her was the absence of fences, the unlocked doors, the friendliness, the positiveness. A place free of the shadow of bad German history.Eleven Children, Without State Support Soon she met Albert Boettcher, known as Junior, president of the Lutheran youth association, descendant of Germans who had moved to the area in the 1920s, proud owner of a 1960 Chevy. They were married in 1963."Heidi was always a wild one," Mr. Boettcher said. "That's why she got out and her brother stayed: a question of spirit. She swam the Mississippi twice, you know, and that's about a mile. Always she hated authority, regulations, doctors, hospitals, pills. So we just went right ahead and enjoyed nature." To such effect that the Boettchers had 11 children between 1964 and 1984 on their 100-acre Altenburg farm. In Germany, this would have provided them with something close to a living. The state pays "Kindergeld," or child money, for every child regardless of parents' income, to encourage child-bearing and support families.At a rate of 250 marks per child for the first two children, 300 for the third, and 350 for each subsequent one, the Boettchers would have been entitled to about $2,000 a month from German authorities.In the United States they received nothing. "I never could bring myself to sit in a county office and ask for some handout like food stamps," Mrs. Boettcher said. "I know where that kind of thing leads." All the family ever accepted was free school lunches during a two-year period. Like more than 15 percent of Americans, they never even had medical insurance. They did not want it, and the children were generally healthy. When one daughter was sick and hospitalized, they raised $3,000 through a collection in the church."We're not the German sheep yet," Mr. Boettcher said, "although we're trying to play catch-up with President Hillary's universal health care. More taxes and more programs will kill this country." The hypothetical has scant value in history, but Mr. Schulz-Netzer dwells on it. The Berlin Wall went up on Aug. 13, 1961; he qualified as a mechanic 15 days later. That qualification was what he had been waiting for to join his sister in the West."My handicap was the wall," he said, sitting drinking a beer, his gaze distant. "If it had gone up three weeks later, I would be with Heidi. But fate wanted me here." And what of his sister's nudge on the train? "At that time, I don't think I was ready to go, anyway," he said.For 16 years after his birth in 1943, the two grew up in the same Wittenberg home. But they are so different now, shaped by opposing cultures, that this shared past seems infinitely remote.He is full of the caution, the fatalism, the unspoken fears of Germany; she seems to have been freed of them by a wide-open continent. "In God We Trust," says the dollar bill, but Germans have every reason to be suspicious of God's benevolence.In a sense, its past explains the country's social safety net. In West Germany, after hyperinflation and Hitler, social cohesion was worth almost any price. In the East, free day care centers and visits by doctors and dentists to schools were billed as the gifts of socialism; they also helped secure compliance to a police state.But the world has changed. Germany has ceased to be the treacherous epicenter of the cold war. It desperately needs more risk-taking: 8.4 percent of the American adult population has started a business, against 2.2 percent in Germany.But the country's essential difficulty since 1989 has been in convincing people it might be worthwhile to trade some of the old and no-longer-affordable security for the rewards of risk.Certainly Mr. Schulz-Netzer seems stuck with the old habits. Can-do is not his motto. For decades he worked in a state company repairing increasingly obsolete buses. It was dull, repetitive and secure."You'd roll up on Monday morning with a headful of alcohol and know nothing would happen," he said. "It was written right there in the East German Constitution: every man and woman has the right and obligation to work." And, where possible, work the angles. From time to time, Mr. Schulz-Netzer would be called into his boss's office and some prominent Communist Party leader would be there needing his car repaired. On the black, for a quiet payment.Mr. Schulz-Netzer was happy to oblige. Over the years they flocked to him: party officials, police, state security agents."They were all so stiff and formal in their official roles," he said, "and then they'd show up at my place and be quite sympathetic." East Germans called such angles their "Lebenstrategie" "life strategy" for making a bad system bearable. And so, Mr. Schulz-Netzer said, people were lulled. "We get used to things," he said, shrugging. "We had movies, we had television, we had cars of a sort, and we even had our own little Florida on the Baltic." Was anything missing? He pondered the question for some time. "Well, we had no incentive to be self-sufficient." Through his acquaintances with party officials, he secured permission to use his moonlighting money to build a house on land next to his mother's home.He had to request official approval for the purchase of each hinge, each doorknob, each tap but over a six-year period he got the job done. That bungalow, completed in 1982, is now his pride and security.Other security evaporated when the wall fell in 1989. The car company struggled through various incarnations before closing in 1997, leaving Mr. Schulz-Netzer without a job like 21.7 percent of adults in Saxony-Anhalt, whose population of 2.7 million is about half that of Missouri (although in area Missouri, half the size of Germany itself, dwarfs Saxony-Anhalt)."It's simple in this society," he said. "If you're over 40, nobody wants you." He has sent out hundreds of job applications, without luck. Garages, he says, do not want to hire a master mechanic when they can employ a youth for half the price.Of course, when the wall came down, he had the option of turning his informal domestic workshop into a real enterprise. He thought seriously about it. "But I was 46, and I would have had to go into debt to be competitive," he said. "It seemed like too much risk, especially as I have no sons who could inherit the business." So he has been living on handouts instead and awaiting a monthly pension of over $1,000, which begins at 60 if he opts for a slightly lower payment than he would receive at the official retirement age of 65. As of next month, he will be on a one-year state program that will put him to work at odd jobs like cleaning cemeteries.A few years ago Karin Schulz-Netzer, who lost her seamstress job in 1991, got an early pension after convincing authorities that she was psychologically troubled."We live all right on our 2,400 marks a month," Mr. Schulz-Netzer said. "I garden, I potter around. I worked for 34 years. This money we get is money we have earned by paying taxes." Strangers Too Scared To Do Anything' In 1991, two years after the wall fell, Mr. and Mrs. Schulz-Netzer traveled to the United States for the first time. In New York they missed their connection, and spent one terrified night in a hotel, not daring to telephone or even urinate."American toilets are different," Mr. Schulz-Netzer explained. "The water level is higher, and so we were worried about a flood." His sister could not believe it. "That is the fear the Communist system engendered," Mrs. Boettcher said. "They were scared to pee, to sleep, to phone, to do anything." After this trauma, the reunion in Altenburg was a happy one. But there was no meeting of the minds. They visited Chicago, and Mr. Schulz-Netzer was appalled by the homeless people he saw. He was also troubled by the restlessness of Americans. "It's slower here in Germany, and I like that." Mrs. Boettcher says that sometimes she feels she does not even recognize her brother. She cannot imagine not working and derives major satisfaction from baby-sitting. "I keep the kids happy, I am doing something," she said. "And I get paid." Her husband, now 72, also works hard. Apart from the farm, he is active in bovine artificial insemination. His record, he said, is 2,600 cows bred in a single year. "It's great business," he said.By almost any estimate, business is better in Missouri than Saxony-Anhalt. The discrepancy between a 4 percent and a 21.7 percent unemployment rate tells much of the story. In Missouri, wage costs are about half the German level.But a central conundrum of European-American relations is that the American success story of the 1990's may not be exportable, any more than Mr. Schulz-Netzer can be convinced that his sister's active American life is better than his own state-supported existence.As Mr. Walter of Deutsche Bank put it: "One thing about Germany today, and much of Europe, is that if you want to achieve something, change something, don't say it's the American way. There's an allergy to American triumphalism." But a decade after unification, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has not yet found another way to convey a reform message that resonates. A united Germany continues to live beyond its means. There are 46 pensioners for every 100 active workers today; in 2030 there will be 96 pensioners for every 100.But of course 2030 is still 30 years away. "We like the social line here," said Mr. Schulz-Netzer said. "In fact, in many ways, we thought of the old regime as good."

ABOUT HEIDI BOETTCHER

From age four, she grew up in the Communist world of East Germany.She escaped March 15, 1960 at age 18.She went to Hanover and then Bavaria, where she trained as a nurse.In September 1961, she immigrated to Wittenberg to be with her distant cousins, the Degenhardts.She married Albert "Junior" Boettcher in 1963. He works as a farmer.They live in Altenburg, population 256, with the two youngest of their 11 children, born between 1964 and 1984.She operates a day nursery for infants in Altenburg.She remains in close touch with family members. She returned in 1990, shortly after the fall of the wall. It marked her first visit in more than 20 years. She returns to Germany for a visit every two or three years.

Fast facts:The Berlin Wall went up in August of 1961. Last Tuesday marked the 10 year anniversary of its fall.More Germans have immigrated to the U.S. than any other nation. Between 1820 and 1996, 7.1 million Germans have started a new life in the United States.The American Wittenberg, where Boettcher immigrated, was founded in 1839 by about 700 Lutherans. They sailed to the United States after leaving the town where Martin Luther nailed his explosive theses to the church door.The unemployment rate in Missouri hovers around 4 percent. Compare that to Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, where unemployment tops 21 percent.

TIMELINE OF EVENTS

In August 1961, the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall to stop the mass exodus of people fleeing Soviet East Berlin for West Berlin and the non-Communist world. The wall was a mass of concrete, barbed wire, and stone that cut into the heart of the city, separating families and friends. For 28 years, it stood as a grim symbol of the gulf between the Communist East and the non-Communist West. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the end of the cold war.-- National Archives and Record AdministrationMay 8, 1945World War II ends and Berlin is divided into four sectors: American, British, French and SovietSummer 1952Border between East and West Germany is closed. Only the portion in Berlin remains open. August 13, 1961The border between East and West Berlin is closed. A wall is built and separates the city into two parts for more than 28 years. The wall separates streets, the railway and even cemeteries. East Germans are not allowed to travel to the West.Aug. 26, 1961All crossing points are closed for West Berlin citizens June 26, 1963President J.F. Kennedy visits Berlin and says: "There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin." Hear Kennedy's remarks at the National Archives and Record Administration site on the Internet: www.nara.gov/exhall/originals/kennedy.htmlNov. 9, 1989The German government announces that travel restrictions for East Germans have been lifted. During the night, hundreds of thousands of celebrates in both parts of the city once again united.TodayFew signs of the wall still remain.