COLUMN ONE : The Past That Won’t Go Away : In modern, democratic Europe, events large and small still fall under the shadows of World War II, a conflict that ended nearly half a century ago.

When Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II tours abroad, her visits are usually upbeat, friendly occasions, heavy on handshakes, goodwill and smiles.

Not here.

Her brief stop in this once-beautiful city last October was a subdued, tense affair. Applause was audible from the estimated 5,000 people who watched her arrive in the city center, but it was thin and brief. Two eggs flew from the crowd and landed in her vicinity. Faces--both German and British--were strained.

A placard in the crowd read, in English, “Think of 13-14 February 1945, Your Majesty”--the night 48 years ago that British and American aircraft firebombed Dresden, destroying most of the city and killing an estimated 35,000 people in the most devastating aerial attack of World War II in Europe.

The people of Dresden had hoped for a gesture from the queen. They wanted her to stop at the pile of rubble that was once the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), one of Europe’s architectural wonders, and acknowledge the city’s suffering.

Despite decades of close Anglo-German cooperation, the gesture did not come.

“She practically just drove through,” said Helga Sievers, 67, a survivor of the raid and member of a small pacifist organization called Interest Group Feb. 13th, 1945. “We know (Nazi) Germany got what it deserved, but after so many years. . .”

Those in the royal party insisted that no snub was intended. It was simply that the Dresden raid remained so controversial in Britain, they said, that such an overt gesture of reconciliation would have stirred up a flap back home.

The emotions surrounding the royal visit--a relatively minor event on the European diplomatic calendar--underscored a far larger, more important phenomenon: In modern, democratic Europe, events large and small still fall under the shadows of World War II, a war that ended nearly half a century ago.

Although rarely acknowledged and seldom spoken about, the lingering traumas of that conflict continue to stoke emotions, complicate ties between longtime friends and influence policies considered pivotal to the Continent’s future.

German historian Ernst Nolte once referred to World War II as the past that won’t go away, and the years have proven his point.

“It is a part of Europe’s history that remains very present today,” commented Dominique Moisi, associate director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.

Moisi said he was not at all surprised that the French government last month decided not to invite German veterans groups to next year’s 50th anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landings. The invitations had been proposed as a gesture of reconciliation between two countries that today are such close allies that they have integrated military units.

“Half a century isn’t much time in European history,” he said.

Still, the decision did not sit well in Bonn.

“Either a friendship is real and there are no taboos, or it’s not really a friendship at all,” said Hans Koerber, executive director of the German Veterans Assn., talking of postwar Franco-German ties. “They said our presence would be a disturbance. Well, I can tell you that after all these years and so many professions of friendship, such actions generate only bitterness. I just can’t understand it.”

Last autumn, plans by German aerospace officials to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the world’s first space shot--which just happened to be a V-2 rocket--were quickly canceled as a result of international outrage, mainly from Britain, over the idea of such a celebration for a weapon that Hitler produced with slave labor and used to terrorize London.

Only a few months earlier, Britain had ignored German pleas and--more than four decades after Germany and Britain became friends--unveiled a statue in London of Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, the man who organized the allied air war against Germany, including the firebombing of Dresden.

In France, events of the last world war are equally fresh in memory.

Last November, a heated debate erupted over whether President Francois Mitterrand should or should not lay Armistice Day flowers at the grave of Marshal Philippe Petain, the World War I hero of Verdun who later disgraced France by leading the Nazi puppet government in Vichy during World War II. (A bouquet was placed at the grave in the president’s name, but only after dark and following the departure of waiting TV crews.)

In an apparent attempt to placate those who had opposed the gesture toward Petain, Mitterrand recently declared July 16 a day of national commemoration for the victims of racist persecution and anti-Semitism.

On that date in 1942, Vichy authorities ordered the roundup of about 13,000 Jews in Paris in what would become the first step on their journey to death camps.

The war has also forged unusual, enduring ties, such as those that today link cities that share little other than the common bond of wartime suffering.

Such relationships, for example, led the English city of Coventry, which was bombed by the Germans, to send trucks of food this winter to Volgograd, which under its former name, Stalingrad, was leveled in the war’s bloodiest battle.

But the memories of World War II do far more than simply rekindle old emotions among Europeans. They also constitute an important element in shaping both the substance and tone of key issues in Europe.

For example:

* Reunited Germany may have Western Europe’s biggest army and the Continent’s most powerful economic muscle, but the country is destined to be a virtual non-player in the Yugoslav conflict, even if it managed a constitutional amendment permitting its forces to enter combat outside NATO areas.

“Committing German forces in Yugoslavia just wouldn’t be possible,” Klaus Naumann, inspector general of the German armed forces, told a group of reporters last year. “The memories (of Germany’s wartime involvement there) are just too strong.”

* Those same war memories today drive Germany and France to push European political integration at a pace that some European Community member states find unrealistically fast.

Still, history has convinced the postwar leaders of both countries, beginning with Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer and continuing through to Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that only by binding both nations into such a union can further conflict be avoided.

Mitterrand’s fear of Germany has strong personal roots. He was once a prisoner of war in German hands.

Many consider it no coincidence that enthusiasm for European political union is weakest in Britain and Denmark--countries whose territory escaped the worst carnage in both wars.

* Russians’ difficulties in squaring their national pride with their need for help from the West is especially hard because the largest donor country is Germany--the nation whose defeat in World War II was long seen as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest achievements.

“They find it very hard to deal with this fact sometimes,” said a German official working in Moscow, who requested anonymity. “It can complicate tasks that are already tough.”

The passage of time has tended to erode the war’s influence on routine diplomatic affairs; but when tensions arise, it can quickly become an added, complicating factor.

In the midst of last autumn’s sterling crisis, for example, when many Britons were convinced that comments by Bundesbank President Helmut Schlesinger had helped undermine the Conservative-led British government’s defense of the pound, there were grumblings in London likening the bank to a modern-day Wehrmacht resorting to Nazi-like tactics.

“The Germans are getting too big for their jackboots,” declared Teddy Taylor, an angry Conservative member of Parliament.

Germany’s ties with Europe’s former Communist countries are even more emotionally loaded with war memories--as Kohl discovered to his dismay three years ago when, for domestic political reasons, he briefly delayed recognition of the post-World War II German-Polish frontier--a border that ceded vast stretches of German land to Poland.

According to a senior aide, Kohl’s attempts to explain his predicament in lengthy personal calls with then-Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki had little impact.

“We thought we had a good (personal) relationship, but he simply didn’t want to understand,” the aide commented.

Neither did those further afield.

Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad used the occasion to draw Kohl as a Hitler look-alike, complete with mustache--a depiction that dismayed Germans when the country’s largest-circulation newspaper reprinted the cartoon on its front page.

A number of factors work to sustain the war’s continuing influence.

Donald Cameron Watt, a historian at the London School of Economics, argues that no event of comparable impact--including the passage of time--has been able to wipe out the memories of a conflict that claimed 53 million lives.

“The views of Germany changed as long as it wasn’t seen as a threat,” Watt said, “but as soon as Germany grew again, the old feelings returned.”

A German counterpart, Berlin Free University historian Wolfgang Wippermann, added simply that “for Germans, it can never be over--not this century, maybe never.”

There are those who believe that the memories will finally die with the last of the wartime generation, but there is evidence that this may not happen.

In Dresden, for example, many of those who quietly watched Queen Elizabeth and held up the placards of protest were in their 20s.