It is easy to belittle the European Union. In Britain, seemingly absurd EU regulations about the curvature of bananas have become the stuff of tabloid newspaper sensations. The meddling Brussels bureaucrat is a political pantomime villain. Other nations have caught the bug. In 2005, French and Dutch voters shot down the EU constitutional treaty. The rejection by two of the EU’s six founding members shattered the dreams of those who envisioned the creation of a United States of Europe.

The newer EU member states in central Europe, which for decades groaned under Soviet occupation, appear far more enthusiastic. For many Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Balts, the EU remains synonymous with political security and economic opportunity.

Against this uncertain background, the leaders of the EU’s 27 member countries gather in Berlin this weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the organisation’s founding charter. The EU will claim much of the credit for one of the longest periods of peace and prosperity in Europe’s fratricidal history. But one nagging question will hover over the proceedings: is the EU an organisation whose time has passed?

The EU’s founding fathers were motivated by one over-riding passion: to avoid war. Haunted by the 36 million Europeans killed in the second world war, the EU’s creators were determined to learn from the past and build a better future. As one popular history of the EU states: ”Adolf Hitler was the main catalyst of the European Community although none of its leaders would readily admit him as a founding father.” Or, as Jean Monnet, one of those early leaders, put it: ”We are not creating coalitions between states, we are unifying men.”

Yet the EU has become the victim of its own success: the entrenchment of peace is now taken for granted. The EU, though, has always been about more than securing peace; it has also been in the business of promoting prosperity. The EU’s architects were practical politicians who realised that closer relations between European nations could only be achieved through economic growth and the interchange of commerce, ideas and peoples.

As the following articles show, that day has come - almost - to pass.

John Thornhill is the FT’s European editor.

Med life crisis

Leslie Crawford hears how Brits are integrating - or not - in Spain.

With a lot of determination and a little bit of luck, River Hately-Richards will soon become the first English boy to graduate from the ranks of a local youth team to play professional football in Spain.

River, a shy teenager with striking hazel eyes, is now 17 and has lived in Malaga since he was eight. He trains four nights a week with the club’s youth team. Football is everything to him, says Michelle Hately, his mother. He often misses out on trips to the UK in order not to miss a match. ”I prefer it here,” he says.

Michelle and her family form part of a new wave of British emigration to Spain. They haven’t come here to retire. They are not fugitives from British justice. They are not interested in belonging - or at least not belonging entirely - to the peculiar colony that is the 760,000-strong British community in Spain, most of whom are based on the Mediterranean coast.

Michelle sold her nursery-school business in London and settled in Spain because she wanted a more relaxed life and to give her children the experience of growing up in a different culture. After nine years, they feel they belong in Spanish society. With her tanned skin and long black hair, Michelle’s daughter Harley, 13, is often confused for a Spaniard. She is capable of running several internet chat sessions at once, in Spanish and English, both in their respective shorthands.

Howard Richards, River and Harley’s father, drives a cab in London and spends one week out of every four in Malaga. Without Europe’s single market and cheap flights, commuting between London and Malaga would never have been so affordable.

The Hately-Richards are lifestyle exiles. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, almost 200,000 Britons leave the UK each year to start new lives abroad. Most of them say they are in search of better weather and a better life. With the spread of second-home ownership, the IPPR estimates more than 5.5 million Britons now live full or part-time overseas - almost one in 10 of the UK population. Spain is the second most popular destination for British emigrants after Australia. The exodus, according to the IPPR, is growing.

And it is not only Britons who are moving to the southernmost tip of Europe. Thousands of Germans, Danes and Norwegians, and a strong contingent of east Europeans, are transforming Spain’s Mediterranean coast into a microcosm of the EU, replicating, perhaps unconsciously, both the goodwill and the tensions that exist between national governments. Some expats have shunned integration, preferring to create a ”Little Britain” or ”Little Germany” on the Med. Others, particularly the most recent arrivals, want to embrace Spanish life and culture. For the Spanish government, the challenge is how to integrate all these different communities to ensure social harmony. Should they be offered political rights, and if so, to what level?

And for the next generation of Europeans, now growing up under the Andalusian sun, will nationality matter at all in a Europe without frontiers?

Andrea Klug, a university lecturer from Detmold in Westphalia, brought her daughter Isabel to live in Malaga when she was four. Isabel is now 14 and fluent in three languages - Spanish, German and English. She is also a budding musician who studies classical guitar at the conservatory in Malaga. Most of her friends are Spanish. She says she feels neither completely German, nor fully Spanish. ”[I am] a mixture, a bit in-between,” she says. ”I think it’s nice to have both cultures. I don’t think nationality will matter much in the future. We are all Europeans, aren’t we?”

It would seem so at the primary school of Nuestra Senora del Carmen in Estepona, where a colourful banner welcomes you in 11 languages. There is also a panel with a big apple tree, in which each apple bears the flag of one of the nationalities represented at the school. So far, there are 32 apples. The UK provides the largest contingent, with 28 children, followed by Argentina, Morocco and Italy. There are many east Europeans, and children from as far away as Pakistan and China; for while northern European families are settling in Andalusia because they like the lifestyle, a far greater number of economic migrants from the newly industrialised nations have come in search of jobs, attracted by Spain’s liberal immigration laws and strong economic growth. Not since the Middle Ages has Andalusia been at the crossroads of so many different cultures.

This has posed a particular challenge for education authorities, who could neither predict nor prepare for the sudden influx of foreign families that began settling on the Mediterranean coast about six years ago. In some towns along the Costa del Sol - a conurbation that stretches for 90 unbroken kilometres along the coast south of Malaga,- the number of foreign children enrolled in state schools now outnumbers Spaniards.

In the province of Malaga alone, 80 teachers have been designated as ”intercultural educators”. These teach foreign children Spanish, and organise multicultural activities such as special sports days and food festivals, to promote integration and - they hope - nip racist attitudes in the bud.

At Nuestra Senora del Carmen school, directions to the headmaster’s office, library and classrooms are posted in five languages: Spanish, English, French, Arabic and Chinese. The classroom for remedial Spanish is well stocked with computers, tapes and lots of visual materials. ”We use a lot of mime, gestures and drawings at first,” says Jose Lazaro Sanchez, who is in charge of the new arrivals.

”East European children take to Spanish very quickly,” he says. ”The British kids, by contrast, are the slowest to adapt, and I have my own thoughts about why this should be so: it is because they have established their own colony here on the coast.”

He is right. All along the Mediterranean coast, Britons can shop for British groceries at ”Spainsbury’s”, a local supermarket, and open accounts with the same high-street banks they used back home. The Halifax, for example, has ”start-up packages” for Britons settling in Spain, and provides access to English-speaking staff and solicitors. There are British pubs, clubs and restaurants, and English-speaking schools for children. Five English-language daily newspapers are published in the Malaga area. Soon, there will also be a satellite television channel, ”Living in Spain”, targeted at the expat community. ”There are so many former BBC people living in Spain, I have had no problem recruiting freelancers to make programmes,” says Richard Browne, who plans to launch the new channel in May.

Although no one on the coast will use the term, the preference of Britons to live in gated, English-speaking communities borders on segregation. And the trend is magnified by the way residential developments are marketed in the UK. In the overpriced, over-saturated Spanish property market, the sale of homes to foreigners has become so specialised it is almost tribal.

The latest craze, for example, is to market Andalusian ”football villages” to the fans of British football clubs. Arsenal started the trend, and now Celtic, Newcastle, Aston Villa and West Ham, among others, have signed promotion deals with Spanish property developers to market luxury flats in a ”football village” near Estepona.

”So, all in all,” Sanchez says, ”British children have few incentives to integrate. After three or four years, they understand Spanish, but refuse to speak it. They gang together. The British kids are the toughest challenge we have right now.”

While Sanchez struggles with tongue-tied Brits, the coastal city of Estepona, 40km from Marbella, struggles with its refuse.

This is because a majority of Europeans fail to register with their local council when they come to live in Spain. Registration is voluntary for EU citizens, says Isabel Ruiz of Estepona’s city council. ”But when new residents don’t register, it creates a big problem for us, because the tax transfers we get from central government to pay for healthcare, education, policing - even rubbish collection - are calculated on the official census,” she explains. ”At the moment, we are struggling to provide services to a rapidly rising population on a totally unrealistic census.”

Some foreign residents deliberately avoid the municipal register because they want to remain invisible to the tax authorities. Others cannot handle the bureaucracy in a language they do not speak. So Estepona, which officially has a population of 55,000, relies on forensic anthropology to estimate the real number of residents.

The 11 town councils south of Malaga keep meticulous records of the amount of rubbish they collect. By comparing that with how much rubbish is generated per person in the rest of Europe, local officials estimate that, even in the low tourist season, they are servicing a population that is 40 per cent bigger than the official census.

”From the kilos of rubbish we collect we can estimate the real number of inhabitants, and Estepona is closer to 90,000 than the official census of 55,000,” says Ruiz.

The Brits, in particular, are notorious for failing to register. ”Part of the problem is that they don’t consider themselves immigrants - they see themselves more like up-market tourists,” she says.

Three years ago, Andalusia’s regional government estimated that if all foreigners registered, it could demand tax transfers to pay for three new hospitals, some 20 primary healthcare clinics and 400 additional doctors. In addition, it would also be able to demand more tax euros for education, policing, transport and sanitation. In an effort to boost their meagre budgets, some town councils along the coast, including Estepona, have held registration drives among their foreign residents. They have also created outreach departments to encourage foreigners to integrate and participate in local politics. In Estepona, 9,000 new foreigners have registered, which means the town will elect an additional four councillors - making a total of 25 - in May’s local elections.

All EU nationals living abroad have the right to vote in municipal elections - no matter where they live within Europe. But few expats in Spain appear interested in exercising that right. ”It’s remarkable, given the size of the foreign population, what little impact foreigners have on local politics. It’s disappointing,” says Bruce McIntyre, the British consul in Malaga. ”We encourage people to register. We tell them not to complain about local services if they do not take part in local life.” Based on their experience in Spain, some European officials have begun to argue that the next logical step in European integration should be taken at the local level, by encouraging EU citizens to vote and even stand in local elections, wherever they live.

Integration, whether of immigrants or nations, is slow work. Sometimes failures appear to reverse the process, or set it back several years. Sometimes it leaps ahead, carried on a wave of euphoria. It is driven by conflicting feelings - all of which are present on the Spanish coast.

The fastest to adapt are children, and foreigners who marry locals, says Rosslyn Crotty, a British consular official in Malaga who herself married a Spaniard and has lived in Malaga for 25 years. Rosslyn, a 52-year-old mother of three, lives in a Spanish-speaking neighbourhood. Her three boys were born in Spanish state hospitals and studied in Spanish schools. It has, in fact, become quite a struggle to keep English going at home, she says. Spanish is the lingua franca, and Rosslyn speaks it with a fluent Andaluz accent.

”Malaga is home for me, even though I will always be a foreigner here,” she says. Mixed couples, she believes, integrate far more rapidly than English couples - from the choice of neighbourhood, to the jobs spouses have, to the choice of schools. ”My boys have an English mum, but that doesn’t make them half-English. They are Spanish through and through.”

Today, the internet, satellite television and low-cost flights make it easier to maintain links with Britain than when Rosslyn left Cornwall 25 years ago. Back then, Spain was not even part of the European Union. (It joined in 1986.)

But it may be too early to tell what effect modern communications will have on national allegiances. Some factors seem to point to a blurring of national identities. Others seem to reinforce them.

At St George’s International School in Malaga, national identity hardly seems to matter at all. The school follows the British curriculum, but a majority of its students are Spaniards from middle-class families who want their children to learn English from an early age.

”In future, we will all have a Tetra Brik identity,” says Jim Shallcross, the head at St George’s. ”On the outside we will all be European, but inside, the kids will want to search out their roots, to understand better who they are.” British children in Malaga talk about the same films, pop stars and personalities as kids in the UK. The internet and satellite television mean they also get to watch many of the same programmes. ”Spain just adds an additional dimension to their lives,” he says.

The demand for British schools is so strong in Spain, it has transformed Shallcross, a former general inspector for education in Surrey who is married to a Spaniard, into something of an impresario. He is opening a second St George’s in Almeria, oversees a British school in Madrid, and is scouting for locations for new British schools in Barcelona and Valladolid.

”We’ve had a big influx of British children in the past two years,” he says. ”The families that are settling here want to work and integrate. They talk of living in villages and making Spanish friends.”

Leslie and Barry Harrison-Pitt are two of the new arrivals. They are former police officers who came to Spain in search of values they believe have been lost in the UK.

Perhaps their views are coloured by the fact that, back in Cheshire, they grappled daily with crime. Leslie retired from the force after being stabbed through the heart by a burglar. ”We saw firsthand the effects of drugs and violence on families, and we didn’t want that for our children,” she says.

There was a problem with money, too. Even with two salaries, the couple could not afford after-school activities for their two children, Andrew and Rebecca, who are studying at St George’s. ”The UK just hasn’t got it right for families,” says Barry. ”Wherever you take your children, you have to pay for the privilege. And then the government wonders why there are so many children idling around on the streets. They don’t have anywhere else to go.”

The Harrison-Pitts wanted to spend more time together as a family, and so they moved to Malaga last year. They say they have found a culture that loves children, and a society that is less violent. There are no hoodies in Andalusia, and no yobs, other than those who come on holiday. Every Friday after school, the Harrison-Pitts go down to the beach for a game of volleyball and dinner. On winter weekends, there is skiing in the Sierra Nevada, just a couple of hours’ drive from Malaga. Andrew, their nine-year-old son, plays football three times a week and Rebecca, aged 10, hopes to start athletics next term. ”And it doesn’t cost us a penny,” says Barry, still a little incredulous at their good fortune.

”We feel we have eradicated all the negative points in our lives,” says Leslie. ”We will never go back.”

In many ways, Leslie and Barry are in the first flush of their love affair with Andalusia, living a dream that is advertised on every lifestyle television programme in the UK and on every billboard on the Costa del Sol. Many Europeans come to Spain lured by the promise of an easy life in the sun, but some return disappointed, defeated and broke. They fail to learn the language, don’t find jobs, or are fleeced by property sharks.

”Selling the Spanish dream has become something of an industry,” says Anne Hall, author of Making a Living in Spain (Survival Handbooks), which she wrote not long after she arrived, in 2002. Almost five years on, she says she would write a very different book. ”My advice is to do lots and lots of research before moving to Spain,” she says over luncheon at her villa in Calahonda, near Marbella. ”You cannot come and do things your way, particularly in business.” Her husband, Brian Hall, who used to run Pret a Manger franchises in London, adds: ”The worst mistake you can make is to think that because you ran a successful business in the UK, you will be able to do so here. You need local contacts; people who will help you interpret the rules and regulations.”

The Harrison-Pitts, however, say they have done their homework and feel they are well prepared to make a success of their new lives. Leslie speaks Spanish and Barry is learning. The couple are financially independent, having retired on full pensions. Their children are happy in their new school, where both parents help out in after-school activities. The Harrison-Pitts want Rebecca and Andrew to grow up bilingual.

”Our hope is that living in Spain will open up the rest of Europe for our children,” Leslie says.

There are two kinds of Brit who come to Spain: those who come to integrate and those who create a mini-Britain for themselves in the sun,” says Jose de Lorenzo, partner at the Irwin Mitchell law practice in Marbella.

For these little Britons, the illusion is shattered when things start to go wrong.

”Everything is wonderful - until the family, or business, hits a problem. Then you find that they don’t have the language, don’t understand the bureaucracy and they feel overwhelmed,” he says. ”In the UK, they would be in control. Here, problems are magnified.”

Irwin Mitchell set up offices in southern Spain two years ago. It has found a ready market for its services among the large expat community. The practice has grown rapidly and now numbers 21 staff.

Other multinationals are also coming to Malaga, apparently attracted by its multilingual, multicultural population. Microsoft is considering setting up a European research centre, having discovered (along with other IT companies) that Spain is a favourite posting for young European programmers. A high-speed train service will link Malaga to Madrid before the end of the year. The airport is soon to treble in size.

The arrival of foreign companies has widened the career prospects for young, bilingual professionals like Emma Tyler, a secretary who works at Irwin Mitchell. Her offices look out on to the Mediterranean. At lunchtime, she goes running on the beach. Emma moved to Marbella with her mother, a writer, when she was 11. Later they settled in Coin, a village in the hills north of Marbella. ”I think I was the first English girl the village had ever seen,” says Emma, who is now 27, ”and it was quite a culture shock for me too. On the coast, you can live in a little English bubble, but further inland you have to adapt. That is where I really started learning about Spanish life.

”I am sure we are having an impact on Spanish culture too - the influence travels both ways,” she says. She feels fortunate in being able to choose the parts she likes best of both cultures. ”I also feel freer. I don’t feel tied to any particular place,” she says.

So will the quintessentially Spanish Andalusia be less Spanish in 20 years? Emma says she doesn’t know. In all fairness, neither do politicians, nor the national leaders who are shaping the EU for the next generation.

At Nuestra Senora del Carmen primary school, ”intercultural teacher” Jose Lazaro Sanchez at least knows where integration starts. ”I cannot imagine what our society will be like in 20 years time,” he says. ”But if we are to avoid racism and xenophobia, integration has to begin in primary school. It is positive to have immigrants of so many different nationalities, it is a cultural treasure,” he says. ”Handled well, it will be fantastic for our small part of the world.”

Leslie Crawford is the FT’s Madrid bureau chief.

Whose side are they on?

Bertrand Benoit finds that after centuries of border-hopping, Alsace is firmly French and finally at peace with its German with its German neighbours.

In France’s rich republican paraphernalia, few accessories are as ubiquitous as the ”monuments aux morts”: memorials honouring the country’s war dead. Even the tiniest hamlet has its obelisk or plinth with reliefs depicting flags, laurels or weapons, and listing soldiers killed in the country’s various wars. The longest lists are always of those men who perished in France’s conflagrations with Germany. But in Strasbourg, in a square adjacent to the medieval heart of the Alsatian capital, a monument stands that is unlike all the others. Neither soldiers nor flags are sculpted here, but instead a Pieta: a weeping woman cradling the dead bodies of two naked men.

The monument’s sombre rather than triumphant aspect is, in fact, Strasbourg’s dignified solution to a dilemma: the soldiers it honours were not necessarily French. In fact, in the most recent world war, they died under the enemy’s flag and for its abhorred cause. That is because the Alsace region, a long-disputed tongue of land that stretches from the Rhine westward to the Vosges mountains, and from Karlsruhe in the north to Basel in the south, has changed hands four times in less than eight decades.

By the end of the second world war, Alsatians born before 1870 would have experienced four changes of nationality. The men fought for France in the Franco-German war of 1870-71, for Germany in the first world war, for France again in 1940, and in a Wehrmacht or SS uniform from 1942 to 1945. Tomi Ungerer, a cartoonist with a loyal following in France and Germany, once joked that his region was ”the toilet of Europe - always occupied”.

I had walked to Strausbourg’s Place de la Republique on the advice of Jean-Pierre Apprill. The 81-year-old retired architect is one of the few men alive to have lived through these confusing times. Son of a German military administrator turned French civil servant, Apprill was among 100,000 Alsatians forcibly drafted by the Nazis in 1942, ordered to fight against Russia as the tide of the war began to turn. But Apprill’s forced conscription was not the sole reason I had sought to meet him. Sifting through accounts written by several malgre-nous (”against our will”) soldiers decades after the war, I had chanced upon an arresting sentence in the prologue to Apprill’s memoirs: ”May this account give my grandchildren, who have both French and German nationalities, an insight into the painful times their families have gone through. I envy them, for they live in a peaceful, borderless Europe, where the Alsace, once bone of contention, has become a hyphen.”

In fact, it was the conscription of the malgre-nous that tipped the region’s loyalties irreversibly towards France. After three centuries of fluid allegiances, the residents of this ancient Germanic land, part of the empire for more than a thousand years before Louis XIV grabbed it in 1648, were spurred by Hitler to cut, irreversibly, Alsace’s historic roots.

For Apprill, however, the break has not been so clean. Six years ago, Sophie, his only daughter from his second marriage, adopted German nationality, surrendering her French passport. Her decision to join the nation he had learnt to hate was a painful shock to Apprill, yet it forced him to at last complete the journey from his malgre-nous years into the present, where he can look towards the east with neither fear nor anger.

When I arrive at the home Apprill built 26 years ago in the Protestant village of Mittelhausen, north of Strasbourg, I find him waiting in the courtyard, a small dark shape standing out in a grey swirl of fog. On the telephone, his voice - the sharp angles of its Alsatian accent blunted by age - had led me to expect a man who looked much older. But his unruly mane of silky white hair, his sparkling blue eyes and his walrus moustache lend him the look of an impressionist painter in his late sixties - rather than an old soldier in his ninth decade. There is no cane to support him, no pair of spectacles perched on his nose; his wit is sharp, and his mind quick and clear.

”See?” he says, pointing at the silver Mercedes that is parked on the dirt path. ”A German car!”

To say that Apprill was not always so relaxed about such distinctions is a gross understatement. There are signs of his former fixation scattered throughout his study, a comfortable room in the house’s annexe. Among piles of books, architects’ models and 1960s designer furniture are wedged striking drawings Apprill sketched in the mid-1990s. One shows faceless children surrounded by helmeted guards; another, a retreating infantry column clad in the Wehrmacht’s grey uniform.

Apprill remembers that when the drafting order reached the family home, on Strasbourg’s rue Charles Grad, they were all at a loss. ”We did not speak good French, my father had been in the German army. Genetically, you could argue I was German. But we all felt French, as had my grandfather who had emigrated to the US.

”God knows where identity sits. Somewhere in the mind, probably - not in the blood.”

After three months of ”re-education”, military drills and indoctrination in Bohemia, Apprill joined the Wehrmacht’s 41st armoured division in Erlangen, a university town in south-eastern Germany. He was attached to the Panzergrenadiers, infantrymen who shadowed tanks during offensives - ”essentially a death sentence”. For more than a year, he managed to avoid being sent to the front, feigning illnesses and learning some skills as a radio operator along the way. But by May 1944, Apprill found himself fighting to free the multinational SS Viking division from its encirclement on the eastern front, south of Warsaw. ”Stalin’s organs, T-34 tanks, artillery, aviation: this was a real baptism of fire,” he recalls.

Once the division had passed through the corridor opened by the Wehrmacht, Apprill and his German comrades, posted along the lip of the receding frontline, had to slow the Russian advance. The ensuing weeks, spent buried in holes, dodging T-34s and hoping not to be crushed under their metal tracks, were the worst. It was a Russian bullet lodged in his arm that brought the nightmare to an end. Wounded, he was sent home in September.

This was not freedom, however. He was dispatched to Thuringia, deep in the shrinking Reich, for treatment. Cut off from his family, he whiled away the days working as a hairdresser in the military hospital of Probstzella and pursuing a youthful love affair with Herta, a local girl. The liaison, brought to an end when General Patton’s Third Army occupied the region, did as much to break his heart as had his battles with the Russian army. As he speaks her name today, sitting in his study, his eyes moisten. A letter from Herta, with a tiny photograph framed in a red heart, is buried in his archives. A child’s script reads: ”Hab mich lieb.”

Mistaken for a member of the LVF - the Nazi legion of French volunteers - Apprill was interned at the American prisoner-of- war camp at Bad Kreuznach where, sleeping in a trench, poorly fed and surrounded by hostile German inmates, he nearly died. When he finally reached home, having been stoned by angry Frenchmen when his convoy crossed the River Soane, he weighed just 42kg.

”I never resented the Americans,” he says. ”It was a misunderstanding. These poor guys were thousands of miles away from home. Most could not have put France on a map, let alone understand the subtleties of the Alsatian situation. In fact I’m grateful to them and to the British. For me Churchill is right up there slightly above de Gaulle. Say anything bad about the Americans or the Brits and I draw my claws.”

The Allies’ rough treatment left no mark. But as Apprill pulled himself back together in the ensuing months and years, rebuilding his body, reading books, writing poems and embarking on what would become a successful career as an architect, he began to develop a different aversion. When the full scale of the Holocaust came to light, his deep-seated, gut-eating grudge against Germany bloomed into a fulminating hatred.

”For me there were no longer Germans, only Nazis,” he says. ”In my eyes, Nazism had extinguished all that was great about this people.”

For years, Apprill would refuse to buy German products or drive a German car. Despite having been born in a German-speaking family and having learnt French only as a second language, he would pretend not to understand when stopped in the street by German tourists looking for the way. His father had been a German civil servant, a Berlin resident, but Apprill had become a dyed-in-the-wool, German-hating Frenchman.

Eugene Riedweg, the most prominent historian of the malgre-nous and Socialist deputy mayor of Mulhouse, the old industrial town known as the Manchester of Alsace, had agreed to meet me to discuss the region’s tangled history. But after half an hour of conversation at his office, he threw me an embarrassed look. ”I’ve got a hairdresser’s appointment in five minutes. What do you say we go there and continue our chat?” Now the stylist is struggling. Her corpulent client twists and turns in his chair, gesticulating as he speaks, oblivious to the busy scissors snicking millimetres above his scalp. I wince, expecting blood.

”The forced conscription was the tipping point for Alsatian identity. If you want to find the moment when its swing towards France became irreversible, that would be it,” he says.

”When the Germans returned in 1940, most Alsatians thought they knew Germany. But they had no notion of Nazism. Bear in mind that most people would have had recent memories of German Alsace. The only cohorts that had gone through the French system from day one were those who were six years old or younger in 1918.”

Up to 1940, the identity and political allegiances of the Alsatian population had been highly fluid. Before 1871 - when the Treaty of Frankfurt ended the brief Franco-Prussian war - France had ruled the region for more than two centuries; despite this, Alsace was widely thought of as a German province of France. French rulers never seriously applied themselves to imposing ”Frenchness” on a culture forged over the course of eight centuries in the German empire. And the Alsace language remained Elsasserditsch, a dialect close to that of the Baden region. (The tongue also bears a striking resemblance to Yiddish, which developed in the Rhine valley after the Jews of England and France were expelled in the 13th and 14th centuries.)

The Prussian occupation that began in 1870 bred well-documented resentment, but also brought a degree of autonomy, including a parliament, within the loosely centralised Reich. Prussia’s rule also saw a massive improvement in infrastructure and utilities, and the first modern financial system. What the industry in Alsace lost when cut off from the French market, it gained in technological know-how. The region became a centre of car production, led by Ettore Bugatti. Strasbourg university was among the most illustrious in the Reich and snapped up several Nobel prizes. And, mirroring the soft hand of the French ancien regime in matters of culture, the Prussians never banned French-language publications in the region.

Some of Prussia’s legacies survive. In 1905, when Church and state were separated in France, the Alsace was German, so its clergy are still state-funded and the Catechism is still taught in Alsatian state schools - unthinkable anywhere else in France. The region’s distinctive social security system is inherited from Bismarck. Countless Wilhelmian monuments are scattered throughout the region - though the SNCF railway operator is currently taking a revenge of sorts on Strasbourg’s Prussian station by encapsulating it in a giant glass and steel testicle.

France’s re-appropriation of the Alsace after 1918 was welcomed by some, but had its dark side. The Alsatian parliament was closed down, and the illegal expulsion and expropriation of 110,000 Germans, including many Jews, decimated the region’s elite. Such insensitivity - including clumsy attempts to eradicate the dialect, which put an end to the social ascension the poorest had enjoyed under German rule - explains why autonomist movements dominated Alsatian political life up to the mid-1930s.

This is not to say that the Alsatians welcomed the German invaders in 1940, says Riedweg. Most were deeply discomfited. But their memories of the Prussian takeover hardly prepared them for what ensued. ”The worst was not Germanisation, however ruthless, but Nazification.”

Unlike in 1870, the region’s new rulers went after even the most innocuous signs of French influence, and this despite the fact that Alsace and neighbouring Lorraine were never legally annexed (legal annexation would have required a peace treaty that was never signed). French-sounding village names were changed, as were people’s first names - Germaine became Germania; Roger, Rudiger; and Jean-Pierre, Hans-Peter. Hundreds of monuments and commemorative plates were destroyed, and streets were rechristened - causing occasional hilarity, as when Mulhouse’s rue du Sauvage (”wild-man street”) was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. In Strasbourg, the artery dedicated to the Fuhrer had been known as avenue Napoleon a century earlier, becoming Kaiser-Wilhelmstrasse in 1871, then boulevard de la Republique in 1918 and, eventually, avenue du General-de-Gaulle in 1945.

Speaking French was severely punished, as was wearing a beret, which turned possession of the soft hat into an act of resistance. The recalcitrant or the merely suspicious were despatched to the ”re-education” camp of Schirmeck or to the sinister Struthof, the only concentration camp on French soil, complete with gas chambers.

Yet, says Riedweg, swiping his brow, nothing crystallised the hatred of the ruled for the rulers as much as the August 1942 draft. Long resisted by the Wehrmacht and by Hitler, who considered the Alsatians unreliable, it affected all males born between 1908 and 1926, or one in 10 inhabitants, ”which means that not a single family was spared”. Of 130,000 drafted Alsatians and Mosellans - people from the mostly French-speaking Moselle area - approximately 42,500 never returned. Altogether, the war cost the Alsace 50,000 lives: three times as many, in relative terms, as in other French regions, not to mention some of the most extensive destruction seen on French soil.

”After that, there was no turning back for the Alsace,” says Riedweg. ”We were French and that was it.”

I am reminded of Jean Koenig, a malgre-nous I had met earlier in the day. More than 60 years after the war, he still spoke French like a foreigner, mistreating its grammar in Teutonic ways and repeatedly switching to German. Yet when he returned from the war after deserting in 1944, his sole concern, he said, ”was to find a French wife”. His subsequent female conquests, of which he confides there were many, followed the same pattern. ”I wanted to speak French, I needed someone next to me with whom I could speak French, and I still do.”

My first impression upon entering the settlement of Eckenheid, a short drive from Jean-Pierre Aprill’s first German posting in Erlangen, is of breathing the very essence of postwar Germany. Built during the 1950s to the 1970s, these understated colonies of whitewashed pavilions are found everywhere in the suburbs of west German cities. Whether in Hamburg, Munich or Dusseldorf, they exude the values of their time. The shoebox houses, built without reference to any architectural idiom, speak of a yearning to turn against the past. They are economical, egalitarian and unpretentious - and yet, with their slanted roofs and discreet wood cladding stretching up from the first floor, they ooze modern Gemutlichkeit.

Scrupulous when it comes to cleaning their cars and sorting their garbage, the locals are polite, slightly suspicious of strangers and, for all their enthusiasm about DIY, dead serious about the Sunday ban on noise. Putting up an Ikea shelf on the wrong day might bring the police to your door. Walking through Eckenheid is like travelling back in time, to economic-miracle Germany.

This is the world of Sophie Nikola, 35-year-old mother of three, and Jean-Pierre Apprill’s daughter. Petite, with dark hair and a pert nose, she looks every bit a German man’s dream of French womanhood. Despite this, her perfect command of the language of Napoleon and a preference for still over sparkling water are the only French things left about her.

In 2001, after 10 years of living in Erlangen and a divorce from Michael, a German IT engineer with a consuming passion for cars and football, she took up German nationality. As the law demanded at the time, she also relinquished her French citizenship. She feared that, as a foreigner, she might be denied the custody of her children. Yet there was more to her move than fear, and there is much more today to her Germanness than an eagle-adorned passport.

”I look back now and I think I would have done it anyway. I wanted to vote. I never wanted to back in France, but somehow here it was important.” Sitting at her living room table and toying with a jam doughnut, a popular seasonal treat in Germany - and the Alsace - during the run-up to Lent, she says her naturalisation was the end, not the start, of a process.

When she dropped by the Burgeramt - the citizen’s office - and asked in accentless German for the appropriate form for switching nationalities, the woman at the desk thought Nikola had picked the wrong queue. Most of Nikola’s friends are German, as are her children, Matthias, Frederik and Ann-Kattrin (although Matthias, the eldest, is proud of, and cultivates, his Gallic heritage). She resents German jokes back home, and while she has lost touch with her homeland’s byzantine political life, she closely tracks the travails of Angela Merkel’s ”grand coalition”. In 2003, Germany amended its legislation to allow dual Franco-German citizenship, a unique exception. Yet Nikola did not claim back her French passport.

”I don’t hang around French expatriates. I can’t stand them moaning about Germany. I feel targeted. I don’t reject my background, but I’m proud of Germany. When I hear we’re the world’s biggest exporter, it makes me proud. Schroder’s opposition to the Iraq war while Chirac was prevaricating made me proud. It’s not that I don’t feel French. I do. But the thought of going back never crossed my mind.”

When Sophie broke the news about her engagement to her parents, Jean-Pierre had already gone a long way towards overcoming his Germanophobia. In the 1970s, he had joined a Franco-German Lions Club in Strasbourg and even bought a BMW. But his reaction was not one for which Sophie was prepared. ”The first time I mentioned Michael he did not respond, and when I brought him home, my father simply left the room. We sat down and he walked out. Michael put it down to paternal jealousy, but I was shocked. He had always been quiet about his war years. We knew the basics but we never really talked about it, and never about feelings.”

Sophie did not know about the recurring nightmares that kept her father awake at night long after the war. However, after moving to Germany, she caught glimpses of the trauma he was suffering: he broke down, for instance, as they were touring Nuremberg’s Reichsparteitagsgelande, the dilapidated site of the annual Nazi party rallies. To Jean-Pierre, it was a painful coincidence that Sophie had ended up in a town so close to Erlangen, of all places, where he had been quartered as a Wehrmacht conscript.

Back in Mittelhausen, Apprill explains how he found peace. First was the realisation, informed by extensive reading after the war and a preoccupation with religion, that the Nazi tragedy was an expression of evil, which, though unique, had its root in human nature generally rather than in a ”German gene”.

”I wouldn’t have kissed them on the mouth,” he says. ”But it became clear to me that all this nastiness, all this cruelty, were human, not German features. Later I began to discern Germany’s diversity. The north-south divide, the differences between Protestants and Catholics. If I had been born five kilometres to the east, I would be German today.”

Franco-German political reconciliation played a central role, too. ”If Adenauer was good enough for de Gaulle,” he says, ”then he was good enough for Apprill.” The final and most important trigger was the jolt that came from looking into his grandchildren’s eyes. Here were little Germans, but also his flesh and blood - and as fragile and innocent as all small children are.

”When I go visit Sophie now, it doesn’t really feel like a foreign country. I understand the language, most things look the way they do here. I’ve walked around Erlangen, and I couldn’t find the barracks, I couldn’t find my small cafe, it’s no longer the place I knew back then.”

Back in the 1940s, as Hermann Goring was touring the region, an Alsatian shouted to him that in six months, Hitler had done more to turn the region away from Germany than the French managed in three centuries. Indeed, today’s Alsace is forgetting its Germanic roots. Elsasserditsch, no longer widely spoken, has become impoverished and antiquated.

According to Riedweg, it was not so much the end of the second world war that finally triggered real change of attitudes in Alsace, but European integration. ”That was the end of the nightmare,” he says. ”Three times we had been the target and booty of Franco-German wars. An integrated Europe meant the bone of contention was removed.

”Now the border is gone. The Germans shop at Carrefour and the Strasbourgeois in Kehl [a German town across the Rhine from Strasbourg]. People commute for work. Germans used to buy property in the Alsace, now the French are buying homes on the other side.”

Apprill’s sharp turn west following the war and his daughter’s migration east are in many ways singular. Some malgre-nous, like Jean Koenig, quickly overcame their anger and shame after returning home. Others developed anti-American feelings while in US custody. And many who went through the harsh Russian prisoner-of-war camp at Tambow, where thousands of Alsatians were interned after deserting on the eastern front, became ardent anti-communists after precociously grasping the nature of Stalinism. Meanwhile, television, the motor car and mass francophone immigration from north Africa and elsewhere have contributed to most young Alsace residents identifying more with France than Germany.

But the Apprill family’s experiences are emblematic nonetheless. Neither Sophie’s marriage and naturalisation, nor Jean-Pierre’s tortuous path to forgiveness could have happened in a fortified Alsace subject to rival claims. Franco-German reconciliation, culminating in an economic and institutional integration that would have been unthinkable at any time in the past four centuries, made them possible. For this, the Alsatians’ gradual rejection of their heritage seems a small price to pay.

(Jean-Pierre Apprill died on Wednesday night, aged 81.)

Poles, apart and together

Stefan Wagstyl asks three generations of Poles - a student studying in London and, at home, her father and grandfather - about life after communism and the country’s EU membership.

The daughter - Jagoda Sumicka

Jagoda Sumicka steps out of the crowds milling around outside the London School of Economics in central London and gives a confident smile.

The petite 22-year-old mathematics student is a long way from her family in Poland. But she seems to be at home among the young people from all over the world who attend the LSE. We set off in search of her favourite cafe. Her first choice is busy and so is her second, so we walk to Covent Garden, where, over a cappuccino, she describes how her country’s accession to the European Union has transformed her life.

She is passionate about her studies in applied mathematics, and the possibility of doing postgraduate work in the philosophy of economics in the UK or the US. She loves her life in London - her student flat near the Globe theatre, on the banks of the Thames, her friends, the cafes and the clubs. ”There is so much to do here,” she says in near-perfect English, smiling and brushing a wisp of red hair away from her eyes.

It is all a far cry from her home near Lubin, a dreary town in south-western Poland dominated by KGHM, the country’s largest metal mining company. The region belonged to Germany before 1945, and is cut off from the rest of Poland by poor road and rail links. The population is mostly composed of the descendants of Poles transported from the east - from former Polish territories incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of the second world war. Lubin is a long way from Wroclaw, the provincial capital, let alone Warsaw and the heartland of Polish cultural life.

Sumicka was itching for a move out of Lubin long before Poland’s EU entry in 2004 created a host of opportunities, including the right to study in Britain on the same terms as UK students.

”I suppose I have always been a bit like my father. Always trying to do something new,” she says.

Her ambitions for high-level academic study were originally inspired by a primary school teacher, who told her of a former pupil who had gone on to study at the prestigious Warsaw School of Economics. ”I decided that if he could go to Warsaw, so could I.”

But first she had to leave Lubin. So, at the age of 16, she persuaded her parents to let her do her last two years of schooling 100km away in Wroclaw, at one of the few schools in Poland which has an English-language International Baccalaureate programme. The competition for places was very tough but Sumicka held her own against the children of the Wroclaw elite.

She finished school in the summer of 2004, just as Poland was entering the EU. While some of her classmates set off immediately for universities in western Europe, Sumicka stuck to her original plan and headed for the Warsaw School of Economics. But she soon found the course was too rigid for her liking and decided to apply to British universities instead. Her first choice would have been Oxford but she had missed the deadline. So she went for the LSE, and won a special scholarship for Polish students. ”I was on holiday when the letter arrived. So my father read it to me over the phone. I was so excited,” she says.

When Sumicka arrived at the LSE, it was only her second visit to London - the first had been a week-long school trip years earlier. ”At first, I felt strange in London. It is never silent. Not like where my parents live,” she says. But she soon found herself at home, not least among the 100-strong Polish students’ society.

Sumicka is too young to remember communist rule or its sudden collapse in 1989. But she appreciates the dramatic political and economic changes that followed, including the role of the liberal economist who spearheaded Poland’s post-communist reforms. ”I was inspired by Leszek Balcerowicz and all he did for the Polish economy.”

As for the EU, she shares none of the scepticism of some of her British friends. She says: ”Poland is such a country that it can only benefit. You can see it in the streets in my parents’ village. People can see that there is something happening.

”Of course, there’s a problem with emigration from Poland. About one million people have left. People who want to refurbish their houses cannot find workers because they are in England.”

She herself is thinking of staying in the UK for further study, or moving to the US. If she returns to Poland it will be to Warsaw because only there will she find a decent range of jobs for professionals with advanced qualifications. So she will not be going back to live in Lubin? No, she says. But she will continue to visit her parents and grandparents. ”I am going quite soon,” she says. ”I’ve just had my birthday. And my brother will have his 21st. We will be celebrating together.”

The father - Waldemar Sumicki

Waldemar Sumicki, Jagoda’s father and a self-made businessman, has just built himself an office suite in a converted barn at the back of his house. Inside are polished wooden floors, gnarled beams and black leather chairs. Outside is the muddy reality of rural Poland at the end the winter.

In the village of Niemstow, just outside Lubin, 51-year-old Sumicki is the local boy made good. Dressed in a sports jacket, dark sweater and jeans, he looks every inch the continental businessman, indistinguishable from his German or French counterparts. Yet he has stayed close to his roots, living and working in the region of south-western Poland where he grew up.

Starting out as a chicken farmer, he has made enough money to start considering serious investments in the local property market. But he has worked very hard for his capital - and is still careful about spending money frivolously. He is about to buy his first luxury car - a secondhand BMW X5 - but worries about the fact that it might get stolen. ”Why do I want it? I don’t know. My student son persuaded me to buy it.”

For Sumicki, the key event in recent Polish history was not the country’s EU accession in 2004 but the end of communism in 1989. The uncontrollable birth of the free market created unprecedented business opportunities that he was quick to exploit.

He was among those Poles who had managed to make money even under communism. The son of a doctor, Sumicki studied surveying at agriculture college in the provincial capital of Wroclaw during 1978-83. These were years of great turmoil, with the rise of the anti-communist Solidarity trade union. But unlike many students, Sumicki had little time for politics. ”I was sympathetic to the cause, but I wasn’t a fighter.”

Instead, he concentrated on earning money, working as a labourer, a coalman and a window cleaner, performing jobs that others refused to do, even under communism. He was game for anything. On summer trips, he worked in Greece and in Austria and once travelled to the former Soviet Union to sell jeans.

Later he worked briefly as a surveyor, before deciding in 1984 to start a chicken farm in Niemstow with his brother. Sumicki’s wife, Teresa, also helped before leaving to bring up their two children, Jagoda and her younger brother Bartlomiej.

Chicken farming was one of few activities open to private entrepreneurs because the authorities were desperate to ease food shortages. Sumicki secured a government loan and threw his considerable energies into the venture. The business made money by selling both to official state buyers and to unofficial traders and other customers.

After 1989, he took advantage of the opening of borders to travel to the Hannover trade fair, where he bought equipment for a hatchery. With the full chicken production cycle under his control, he could profit from the wild swings in the emerging market economy, selling either eggs, live chicks or chicken for slaughter, depending on price. He recalls: ”Those were very unpredictable times. My generation had to be very quick and flexible.”

Sumicki was for a while one of Poland’s largest international chicken traders, handling six million birds in his record year and dealing with countries across eastern and western Europe. But as the market stabilised he realised he would have to invest in much larger production sites. In 1999, he decided to sell out and put his money into financial investments and trading ventures. Last year, he seized on a new opportunity and bought the Lower Silesian network of Norma 2000, a national company selling windows and doors. With four shops and 15 staff, he is planning to expand. But he also has his eye on the local property market. ”I am interested in a couple of sites. But it is difficult. There are some very big investors around. Prices keep going up,” he says.

But he admits, with some regret, that business has changed since the early days of Polish capitalism. ”The country is stabilising. Today, you need plans. You have to deal with regulations. The days of shooting in the dark are over.”

The grandfather - Tadeusz Klimczuk

Tadeusz Klimczuk has never let life get him down. Aged 80, Jagoda’s maternal grandfather belongs to a generation of Poles who lived through the second world war, the oppression of communism and the upheavals of the newly emerged modern Polish democratic state.

He has a bad leg. His wife, Kazimiera, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The couple must manage on a combined pension of just 1,000 zlotys a month. Yet, he says brightly, ”There’s nothing to complain about. I am very happy. I have a son and a daughter and clever grandchildren.”

The Klimczuks live in the small town of Prochowice, near Lubin, on the top floor of a solid three-storey house. Their modest two-room flat is sparsely furnished. There are a couple of clocks, a few pieces of china and glass on some shelves, but few books. It is enough space for two pensioners, but the flat must have seemed cramped when the Klimczuks arrived here with their two children and Tadeusz’s father in the late 1950s.

The couple were born a long way from Prochowice. They come from a village near the former Polish city of Grodno, which is now in Belarus. Previously part of the Russian empire, it was incorporated into independent Poland after the first world war and by 1939 the territory was firmly Polish. Then came the Red Army invasion, soon followed by Nazi occupation. Klimczuk remembers the war, especially the bloody fighting which accompanied the German retreat of 1944-45, when he was wounded in the arm.

After the war, the region was annexed by the Soviet Union. Communist officials arrived in the village and forced the peasants to surrender most of their land to communal farms. Klimczuk recalls going hungry as agricultural output collapsed amid the bureaucracy, quotas and penalties imposed by the communist authorities. ”It was a difficult time,” he says. ”My mother had to use onion juice for frying because there was no fat.”

The Soviet authorities offered ethnic Poles the opportunity to move to Poland, in order to clear the region of a potential security threat. The couple resisted, not wanting to give up their ancestral village. But in 1958, they finally decided to join the exodus, with Klimczuk’s ageing father and their two small children. They could take most personal possessions but had to leave behind their animals and their land. ”It was very sad,” he says.

With no idea of their destination, the family was despatched to northern Poland, to a site surrounded by dense forests. They hated it, contacted friends in Prochowice and moved - to the annoyance of the communist officials, who said they were breaking the rules.

Eventually the authorities found them a home in Prochowice, which had belonged to Germany before the war and was now filled with people like the Klimczuks - exiles from the east. Life was hard, with shortages of food, medicines and building materials. But the Klimczuks managed. They both secured jobs in the local tannery, where they worked until their retirement in the 1980s.

Like many others, Klimczuk managed a smallholding and a vegetable garden. At one time, he kept pigs. At another, there were minks, from which he produced fur coats. For years he had chickens. He gave up his smallholding a few years ago but still has his vegetable plot. However, this year, for the first time in decades he will not be planting anything, because of his bad leg. ”It will lie fallow,” he says wryly.

He is pleased with Poland’s EU accession: both he and his wife voted for membership in the 2004 referendum. ”It’s right for us to be in this good environment. We are better off and more secure. The EU supports us when we have problems, like with our meat exports to Russia,” he says, referring to a current trade dispute.

He is sad to see many young people from the region leaving for western Europe, as his granddaughter has done. But he says they have to go to find work. ”I can’t complain. Every time Jagoda is back in Poland, she comes to visit us.”