Sixty-four years after the end of the Nazi era and its atrocious crimes against humanity, Germans are no longer ashamed to wave their flag or sing their national anthem. An increasing number of people here are proud to be German, and proud of the democratic and economic achievements this country has accumulated over the past decades.

Germany, aided by money from the U.S. Marshall plan, produced an economic miracle, became a key member of the European Union and survived the Cold War undamaged to reunite with its communist eastern half after a peaceful revolution.

This Saturday, Germany is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its democratic constitution with a large outdoor party in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.

It seems that Germans are slowly beginning to sense that they can have feelings that go beyond the collective guilt they have been living with for decades because of the country's Nazi past.

This came to light in dramatic fashion in 2006, when Germany hosted the FIFA Soccer World Cup. Germans flew flags from their balconies and painted their faces black, red and yellow -- unthinkable only a few years before.

The motto of the tournament, which turned into a huge publicity event for the country and its people, was: "A time to make friends."

This new, albeit careful, patriotism has even influenced diplomacy, as politicians here are promoting a more self-confident foreign policy to play with the world's biggest powers.

Germany has 4,000 soldiers stationed with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and has completed numerous peacekeeping missions all over the globe.

But that doesn't mean the past is forgotten.

The trial against suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk is dominating the press here. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote: "The guilt of post-war justice can't be erased. But today's justice system can at least ascertain the guilt of the likes of Demjanjuk." And Germans, who remain overwhelmingly pacifist, are still uneasy about military action.

The Afghanistan mission remains unpopular, and Berlin has been able to get a green light for it because it restricted the mission to involve only civil reconstruction efforts. The German government has ducked several calls to send its soldiers into the bloody fighting in southern Afghanistan, mainly because Berlin knows that people here are not ready to see German soldiers engaging in large-scale firefights.

In an era of cool U.S.-German relations, Germany fiercely opposed the U.S.-led Iraq war. Parliament, which has to give its green light to any military mission, would never support a campaign that has even the slightest feel of unilateralism.

But the biggest task that Germans are facing today lies not in its past, but in the future. Germany reunified in 1990, but today, nearly two decades later, Germans do not yet feel entirely united.

A recent survey showed only 40 percent of former East Germans surveyed are happy with their life since the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a 20-point drop from a similar study conducted a decade ago.

Many East Germans, colloquially called "Ossis," feel they have lost economically and socially. In the eastern states, unemployment is higher and wages are lower than in the western part. Germany has pumped some $1.9 trillion into eastern Germany, providing it an excellent infrastructure, but many talented people still go to the West to make a career.

Moreover, the Ossis don't yet feel accepted by their counterparts in Hamburg or Munich, the "Wessis."

The Wessis are merely lecturing Ossis about the atrocities of the communist German Democratic Republic, which spied on and walled in its people, and forget that many GDR citizens achieved things they can be proud of.

Die Linke, a far-left party that grew out of the SED, the communist party that ruled the GDR, has gained popular support in recent years by playing to that frustration.

But eastern Germans often ignore the fact that their country had been bankrupted by a regime that cultivated a social system it couldn't afford and an economy with products the West didn't need. The money Germany has since pumped in may not have been at all times well spent, but without 50 years of the GDR, the region would likely not have needed that money at all.

A prominent TV talk show Tuesday discussed the state of unity 20 years after the fall of the wall. It summoned politicians, journalists and historians from eastern and western Germany.

Guido Knopp, one of Germany's leading historians, said it would take at least two generations until the wall disappears in the minds of the people. He added that Germans should be happy to live in the most prosperous and peaceful era the country has ever experienced.

"Germany's best years are just beginning," he said.

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