BERLIN - SATURDAY was a big day for Germany with celebrations marking 60 years as a democracy, the election of a president and perhaps most importantly for many people, the climax of the football season.
A quarter of a million Germans gathered in Berlin to celebrate 60 years since the country emerged from the ruins of the Nazi era and World War II to lay the foundations for a democratic, peaceful and prosperous nation.
Being patriotic is something of a new phenomenon in Germany.
For decades deep psychological scars from the war kept such feelings at bay, summed up by West Germany's then-president Gustav Heinemann famously declaring in 1969 that he loved his wife, not his country.
Meanwhile MPs and public figures were due to choose who will hold the largely ceremonial post of German president for the next five years, with the conservative incumbent Horst Koehler tipped to secure a second term.
Last but not least the country was on tenterhooks to find out which football team would clinch the Bundesliga title, with Bayern Munich, Stuttgart and Wolfsburg all in the running to be crowned champions.
A newly felt sense of good-humoured patriotism was expected to be on full show around the historic Brandenburg Gate for a celebration of all things German, six decades since the foundation of the federal republic in 1949.
'We Germans all have a reason to be happy about the German Federal Republic turning 60 and to celebrate together its birthday on May 23,' Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a podcast ahead of the celebrations.
Specifically, the events celebrate the 1949 creation of a democratic nation that still bore the shame of the Nazis' horrors and was struggling to rebuild after total defeat and destruction in 1945.
The constitution that was drawn up for this country - West Germany as it was - has been used a model for other young democracies, primarily in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Other events to mark this milestone are planned across Germany in 2009, which also sees the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall before the unification of West and East Germany in 1990, and is an election year. -- AFP
