German Poles Assert Their Restored Identities : Eastern Europe: Re-emergence of a long-suppressed minority raises fears of ethnic tensions.

If the slightly stooped old man held the official paper with some reverence, it was understandable.

Duly stamped and dated by the regional authorities, the document did nothing less than give him back the name taken from him nearly four decades ago.

Johann Kroll, German-born, German-bred and German still, was again officially a real person.

Gone was Jan Krol, the Polish identity he was forced to assume in the early 1950s as part of a government attempt to deny the existence of the several hundred thousand Germans who remained on land transferred from Germany to Poland at the end of World War II.

“We lost our culture, our customs, everything,” said Kroll, a 68-year-old leader of the German minority in the Upper Silesia region that extends well beyond the small farming community about 160 miles southwest of Warsaw. “They refused to admit we existed.”

The sense of excitement is visible now among the German speakers here as they talk of the German teacher who arrived from Hamburg in September, the fast-swelling membership in the local “German Friendship Circle” and a recent Roman Catholic Mass celebrated in German, the village’s first in many years.

But there is little euphoria among the Poles around them. Johann Kroll’s bureaucratic resurrection and the emergence of the potentially powerful ethnic minority it brings carry with them the seeds of social trouble.

Variously estimated at between 600,000 and 950,000, Poland’s German population is still in the formative stages of organizing itself, but its leaders are already well-armed with demands, including “self-administration” in cultural, religious, educational, economic and financial affairs.

“All that was German in 1945, we want back,” Kroll said. “Our culture, our names, the names of our villages, our cities. . . . (We) need guarantees from the Polish government we won’t be discriminated against.”

Kroll and other German speakers interviewed in western Poland not long ago underscored their desire to live in peace with Poles, but it is difficult to understand how their aspirations can be fulfilled without social tension.

The budding cultural reawakening of German-speaking Poles is part of a far broader revival of ethnic consciousness among minorities now sweeping Eastern Europe, consciousness that was suppressed and ignored by the Communist police states that ruled for more than 40 years.

Reconciling the aspirations of these groups with the society at large is viewed as one of the most difficult, potentially volatile social problems facing the new European democracies.

As elsewhere in Europe, relations between the majority Polish population and the German minority are loaded with historical tragedy and injustice.

The Polish-German border treaty signed in Warsaw last month, which renounced all territorial claims and guaranteed the existing frontier along the Oder and Neisse rivers, is merely the latest in a series of developments in the post-World War II era to ease a relationship still thick with emotion and mistrust.

No single nation felt the brunt of Nazi Germany’s cruelty more fully or was more completely ravaged by it than was Poland. The most haunting memories of the Holocaust--Auschwitz, Treblinka, the Warsaw Ghetto--are found here.

In the chaos that followed the Third Reich’s collapse in 1945, Poles forcibly drove 5.5 million Germans from territory transferred from German to Polish sovereignty as part of the postwar readjustment of frontiers that effectively shifted Poland 160 miles westward.

Only with the collapse of communism in Poland have come the first public admissions that German civilians suffered and died during the expulsion and the official acknowledgement that many stayed behind.

Krystyna Palanska, who administers Gogolin’s recently formed German Friendship Circle from an office in the town hall previously occupied by the local Communist Party, recalls uniformed Poles entering her family home in the early 1950s and confiscating German language books.

But she agrees that was long ago and that times have changed.

At present, relations between Poles and minority Germans remain remarkably free of the aggression and violence that have fueled ethnic hatred elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Aside from occasional verbal insults and some anti-German graffiti in the city of Opole, 20 miles to the north, after a German candidate won a preliminary election for a national parliamentary seat--he lost in the final round--relations have remained free of incidents.

However, there are warning signs.

Silesia’s long, checkered history presents its own complications.

School-age Poles are taught that their ancestors first settled Silesia more than 1,000 years ago. Germans talk of 800-year-deep roots to the same land and note that under German rule in the last century, Silesia blossomed into one of Europe’s premier industrial regions.

“The question is, who is the visitor here and who is the host,” said Kroll.

Down at the headquarters of the German Friendship Circle, there seems little doubt.

Next to a German flag with a blue-and-white Upper Silesian coat of arms neatly sewn in the center, a map shows Gogolin, Opole and the rest of Upper Silesia under the title, “Eastern Territories of the German Reich in Borders of Dec. 31, 1937.”

Although the new border treaty disappointed members of the German minority here and angered expellee groups active in western Germany, who spoke of a “black day for expellees,” few Germans still realistically demand the return of Upper Silesia to Germany.

Horst-Egon Rennert, spokesman for the League of Expellees in Bonn, said his organization will now press for guarantees of the rights of the German minority.

Kroll, noting that the core of the German minority was centered in a region 150 miles from the border, dismissed frontier changes as irrelevant.

“It’s not possible,” he said.

So the potential for social tension lies elsewhere, in the rising expectations of the German minority, its sense of resentment over previous treatment and the fallout from a prosperous Germany in the form of easier travel and gifts from relatives that have begun to lift its living standards above those of the average Pole.

Some Poles sarcastically characterize those who have recently rediscovered their German roots as “Volkswagen Germans.”

A sense of German superiority is also a danger.

Among the Germans here, the words lazy and Poles have virtually become one, punctuating conversations that run from voting to churchgoing habits.

This attitude confronts a generation of Poles weaned on tales of suffering at the hands of Germans.

“That’s 50 years of hate,” noted Father Wolfgang Globisch, 57, a German-speaking Catholic priest from the city he calls Kreuzburg and Polish speakers know as Kluczbork, 50 miles north of here. “In schools, on TV, everywhere, children learned only to hate everything that was German. It’s settled deep into the soul.”

At present, Poles express more worry than hate.

Katarzyna Lubiniecka, a Polish journalist based in Wroclaw who covers developments among Poland’s minorities, admitted her own concern about the list of demands made by the German minority.

“They don’t have an intellectual elite and so can be easily manipulated,” she said. “The more you eat, the hungrier you get.”

Some of those involved in smoothing relations between Germans and Poles believe that the future relationship depends largely on the national mood in both countries.

“If nationalist feelings don’t get the upper hand, then relations can go well,” Father Globisch said. “But if these emotions gather strength, it could turn very bad.”