BONN -- Germany's mixed feelings about its past were on full display Monday as the uninvited nation watched its one-time conquerors mark the 50th anniversary of the D-day landings in France. Breakfast television featured the modern-day flotilla ferrying leaders of the Allied countries to Normandy and newspaper editorials hailed the June 6, 1944 landings as the beginning of Germany's liberation from Nazi tyranny. "Our one-time opponents are celebrating a victory they won by great sacrifice," the mass-circulation Bild newspaper said. "We Germans remember our dead in the knowledge that only the total victory of the anti-Hitler coalition brought us the greatest thing any community can have: a stable democracy." Between the lines, though, the media echoed the unease and uncertainty that have overshadowed German commentaries about a day their postwar allies look back to with pride. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, interviewed with French President Fran?ois Mitterrand in the S--ddeutsche Zeitung, felt obliged once again to explain why he was not at the ceremonies. "I never sought an invitation, despite what has been said repeatedly, because I think German participation at this occasion is not fitting," he said. The newspaper's cartoonist probably caught the mood better with a sketch of Kohl, champagne glass in hand, pressing his nose to a window to toast American, British and French veterans sitting down inside for a D-day anniversary drink. Reporting on the Normandy ceremonies, Berlin's irreverent Tageszeitung newspaper remarked dryly: "Germans are not present -- the SS got there first." Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis and French historian Joseph Rovan said Germans still had difficulty seeing the Allies' World War II victory as their own liberation from the Nazis rather than a defeat for Germany. Jupp Darchinger, one of Germany's leading photographers, seemed lost when a young television reporter asked him about his wartime experiences during a program about his pictures. "We were soldiers, we had to do our service," he said uneasily. "That's the way it was."
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