BERLIN: For decades, the burden of World War II meant Germany lacked the heavyweight attitude to match its mighty factories and broad autobahns.

It was rich enough to spend billions on compensating the victims of its aggression and genocide, but where foreign policy was concerned, it was a meek and humble giant.

That’s been changing as the world looks back 60 years after the German surrender.

Lately Germany has unsettled some allies with a new pushiness about putting its own interests first. It split with the United States, its longtime ally, over the war in Iraq. It is pressing for an end to the weapons embargo on China without waiting for its European Union partner-countries to reach consensus.

Equally significant is its attitude towards the European Union. The EU was supposed to be the stage on which Germany would demonstrate harmony and good-neighborliness toward the European countries ravaged by Hitler’s army. But for three years it has broken the EU’s limits on budget deficits – necessary for its economy, it says, but annoying to its more fiscally correct EU partners.

This new assertiveness has come with the passage of time and the rise to power of a new generation – people such as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was born 7 April, 1944 – just 13 months before Germany surrendered to the Allies.

That’s not to say Germany has shut the book on the past. The sense of guilt and responsibility for war and genocide remains strong, as witnessed by the new Holocaust memorial, which was inaugurated on 10 May, two days after the 60th anniversary of 1945 allied victory in Europe was marked in weekend celebrations.

The array of sombre slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin will remind every passer-by that the Nazis killed six million Jews.

Yet, that awareness is now accompanied by a new, hardheaded self-image. Through the Cold War, when Germany was split in two, the Western half was dependent on America to defend it. Today, 60 years after Hitler’s death and 15 years after the “Germanys” were reunited, Germans yearn to see themselves as citizens of one normal country among others.

A Stern magazine poll shows that 66 per cent of Germans think it’s “good” that they lost the war, and only 13 per cent regret it. But 68 per cent also agreed that now “Germany can behave like any other country.”

Eberhard Sandschneider, a scholar at the German Council on Foreign Relations, notes that today’s politicians grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Vietnam War was raging and “criticising the US was more in vogue than being grateful to the United States.”

As for the post-1960s generation’s view of World War II – they “feel responsibility but they wouldn’t feel guilty any more,” he said.

Germany, with its 82 million people, is the largest country on the continent, and its diplomatic imperative has usually been to assure its neighbours that it will never again seek to dominate them. Some might see its new posture as a change, but Sandschneider insists that’s not so.

“It would certainly be too much to argue that we are seeking domination in Europe,” he said. “But a strong position in order to defend our national interests... has become less difficult than it used to be.”

Still, the subject is so sensitive that Germany does escapes the filter of the war. Last month, when Joseph Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, the first German Pope in a millennium, there was little celebration or preening in Germany. That’s partly because Benedict’s conservatism puts him out of step even with many Catholics there. But it’s also because Germans still frown on extravagant shows of national pride after the extremism of the Nazi era.

The war and the Holocaust are still very much in the public eye. TV viewers are bombarded with documentaries, and each year brings a flood of new books. Downfall, Germany’s cinema event of the year, portrays the final battle for Berlin and Hitler’s last days in relentless, unflinching detail.

But the “ordinary” Germany is also on ample display for American moviegoers. The Tunnel, a Great Escape-type thriller about fleeing communist East Germany, barely touches on the war. Likewise Head-On, which is entirely about the difficulties of Turkish immigrant families in Germany, and Schultze Gets the Blues, the quirky tale of a jobless German miner and blues enthusiast wandering through the Mississippi Delta.

For 16 years until Schroeder was elected in 1998, Germany was governed by Helmut Kohl, who was 15 when the war ended. Kohl believed in strong relations with the United States and close integration into the EU. The two pillars of his approach were “to try to appear less important than you are, and to give the small countries the impression that they count,” said Karl-Heinz Kamp, national security coordinator at the Konrad Adenauer Institute.

“Schroeder has changed both of those pillars,” he said.

Also irksome to some European partners is Germany’s push for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. France supports the idea, but other countries favor a seat for Europe as a whole.

Some see a sign of the new Germany in the architecture in Berlin, where the government moved from the Cold War capital of Bonn in 1999. Bonn’s small-town modesty contrasts sharply with the sprawling concrete and glass palaces built for the chancellor and legislature in reunified Berlin.

Germany’s new assertiveness isn’t based on military power, and the country has a strong anti-militarist outlook. Far more important to Germans is the economy, stagnating with a 12.5 percent unemployment rate, and a welfare system whose lavish benefits may be heading to a crisis as the birthrate falls.

Kamp thinks these are also factors driving the new assertiveness – that Schroeder’s forays into foreign policy reflect frustration over inability to return the economy to the boom times of the past.

“Foreign policy is more fun, if you are in a difficult domestic situation,” Kamp said.