For Alsace-Lorraine, Fear of Germany Is a Thing of the Past : Europe: The region has been fought over in three wars. Now, its citizens say they’re content to be on the sidelines as the Continent is reshaped.

Alsace-Lorraine is a region forever in between, a sort of half-German, half-French hybrid that has been pushed around in three wars and changed hands four times since 1870.

Ask a question in German and the answer will come back in French. Offer a croissant and get a pretzel in return.

In 1940, mothers named their sons Adolf, after Hitler. Five years later, they were naming them Charles, after De Gaulle. Fathers studied Schiller and Goethe. Their sons study Rabelais and Proust.

The most famous statue here to the men who fell in the two world wars bears the simple inscription, “To Our Dead.” It shows a mother comforting her two dying sons, one a German soldier, the other French.

For more than a century, Alsace-Lorraine has been a flash point between the two great continental powers. If anyone in the world has a historical reason to fear a unified Germany, it is the people of this region on the eastern fringe of France, wedged between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine.

But the main bone of contention between Germany and its neighbors is no longer Alsace-Lorraine. Rather, it has been the frontier between Poland and East Germany--much to the relief of the war-weary people here.

The pro-German “autonomist” movement that once flourished here is all but dead. The German-language edition of the regional newspaper Les Dernieres Nouvelles has shrunk to 50,000 copies, compared to more than 220,000 for the French-language editions.

The Rhine is no longer a military frontier. The customs and immigration stations on both sides of the river are usually unmanned. Few Germans, even members of the most right-wing political parties, still dream the old dream of a German Alsace and a German Lorraine. For most people here, the terrible cycle of history has finally been broken.

“We have learned the lessons of history,” University of Strasbourg historian Bernard Vogler said. “Because of the excesses of Hitler, everybody considers it crazy to claim to be part of Germany.”

The difference between the ethnic Germans in western Poland and the ethnic Germans of Alsace, Vogler said, is that “the Germans who stay in Poland have always taken the German side, but the Alsatians have a French history dating back to the revolution.”

There are still the scars of three German occupations. The old men sipping wine and speaking the Alsatian dialect at La Bague D’Or restaurant in Strasbourg talk of the terrible cold in Leningrad, where they served as conscripts in Hitler’s army. During World War II more than 130,000 Alsatians served in the German army, most of them on the eastern front, where they could not escape back into France.

“What could I do?” one of the men, Rene Peffert, 78, said. “I had to protect myself. The Russians who were shooting at me didn’t know I was a friendly Frenchman from Alsace.”

Jacky Dreyfus, 40, grand rabbi in Colmar, a wine-producing city 40 miles south of Strasbourg, said that many of the people in the Jewish community there still refuse to cross the Rhine and set foot in Germany, though it is only 10 minutes away. During the war, more than 400 of Colmar’s 1,400 Jews died in German concentration camps. The rest were forced to flee the country, and most of their possessions were confiscated by pro-German neighbors.

Despite this residual bitterness, Dreyfus said he no longer fears German aggression.

“I can’t imagine France and Germany fighting again,” he told an interviewer.

Officials and intellectuals in distant Paris have stronger reservations about a bigger, more powerful Germany then the people of Alsace-Lorraine. Parisians fear that an expanded Germany will dwarf France economically and kill its dream of becoming the center of the new Europe.

Alsatians see a stronger, richer Germany as an economic boost for the region.

“I don’t think a region like Alsace can do anything but benefit from the German aggrandizement,” said Richard Kleinschmager, a professor at Pasteur University and a specialist in the geography and politics of Alsace-Lorraine. “From the economic point of view, the region will gain.”

Opinion polls show that the French public is generally in favor of reunification, but deep private worries persist.

The U.S. ambassador in Paris, Walter J. P. Curley, noted this division in a recent talk to American and British journalists.

“Publicly, the French see that German reunification is coming down the track and there is no reason to lie in front of it,” Curley said. “Privately, they worry about the Germans revisiting us with that old assertiveness. They worry about the assertiveness becoming arrogance.”

The late French writer Francois Mauriac once quipped, “I like Germany so much I want there to be two of them.”

But most people here in Strasbourg, site of the European Parliament, see the shift in European power as something that will benefit Alsace-Lorraine.

“History is gravitating in our direction,” Vogler said.

Many local political leaders say that the growing sense of a common European identity, fostered by the European Community, is what finally killed the recurring problem of Alsace-Lorraine. European nationalism has taken hold here perhaps more than in any other part of France. The 12-star, blue-and-gold European flag is nearly as common as the French tricolor.

Mayor Edmond Gerrer of Colmar, a member of the French Parliament, said he considers himself a “European first.”

Gerrer, a former German army conscript who escaped to France, feels that Alsace-Lorraine will help unite Europe, not destroy it.

“Because of who we are,” he said, “we Alsatians can offer a hand to the Germans and a hand to the French. We can bring everyone to the table, where we will all eat very well.”

Professor Kleinschmager said that the greatest fear among the 1.6 million Alsatians is that German interests in East Germany and Eastern Europe will distract them from economic development in the French-German Rhineland.

“It is the opposite of what existed before,” he said. “The people are not afraid that the Germans will come. They are afraid they will go away.”