It’s Just Another Day in Germany : D-day: There will be no ceremonies or moments of silence. Citizens have ‘mixed feelings,’ and Bonn prefers to ‘look forward.’

A small building set in a grove of chestnut trees on Berlin’s once-grand Unter den Linden houses Germany’s central war memorial: Inside its walls, heavily incised by machine-gun fire from half a century ago, stands a single bronze sculpture of a woman cradling the body of her son. “To the victims of war and tyranny,” reads the inscription.

If there were any interest on the part of Germans in commemorating the Normandy landings today, it ought to be evident here. Young men drafted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht were, after all, victims of war--about 100,000 German soldiers died in the two months it took the Allies to consolidate a front in northern France.

But in unavoidable contrast to the surging crowds and victors’ pageantry marking D-day’s 50th anniversary day 700-odd miles to the west, this shrine stands silent and largely empty. A little rain falls through the open-air skylight above the sculpture; a few wilted bouquets lie on the stone floor in front of the statue; visitors trickle silently in and out the door. That is all.

“Germany looks at the D-day festivities with mixed feelings,” noted Klaus Bering of the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur. “While the Allies celebrate, the Germans are just watching from the sidelines.”

Indeed, there are no ceremonies in Germany today, no government pronouncements, no scheduled moment of silence.

German television is airing “The Longest Day,” and a few German veterans are making independent pilgrimages to the French beaches, but on the whole, the proceedings that have captured so much attention in the United States have made for a virtual non-event here.

True, for Germany, the landings in Normandy were really just a sideshow to the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, which for this country was the turning point of World War II. And Germany doesn’t commemorate that high-casualty catastrophe either, because the Allied occupiers banned veterans groups here in the first years after the war, and a clubby veterans tradition has not flourished in Germany the way it has in the United States.

But Germany’s reluctance to note the passing of the D-day anniversary is more than just a reflection of how few veterans groups there are or of how much greater emphasis Germans place on the Eastern Front than on France.

It is also a reflection of Germany’s everlasting struggle to come to terms with its past. Even 50 years of good relations with the Western democracies and a successful grafting of democratic tissue onto the German character have not been enough to erase the horror of the Third Reich.

So reluctant are most Germans today to connect with their collective past that they are slow even to salute their dead.

In Bonn, for instance, there were hurt feelings when the French left Chancellor Helmut Kohl off the official Normandy guest list. Yet Kohl merely responded that he hadn’t wanted to go to Normandy anyway, and he went on to forbid German diplomats to participate in most D-day events.

“Let these people celebrate this day,” Kohl said in a recent interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. “Let the survivors commemorate it in honor of their fallen comrades. . . . This is no day for us Germans to join in the commemoration.”

The symbol-loving Kohl will, however, meet with French President Francois Mitterrand just two days after the D-day ceremonies, during a youth festival in Heidelberg. And he has said German diplomats may attend events in France if they lack a military character and “look forward to the future.”

Indeed, to the extent there has been any discussion of D-day among German commentators in the last week, virtually all of it has “looked forward,” dealing with the years since World War II and not the war years themselves, or any other aspect of National Socialism.

Much of the commentary has been upbeat, concentrating on the achievements of the last half-century, the fruitful association with the United States and calling the fall of the Third Reich a “liberation” for Germans too.

But a recent survey highlights the difficulty Germans still have, half a century after the war, in coming to grips with the rise of Hitler and agreeing upon what it may say about German society.

When asked who was to blame for the start of World War II, 56% of those surveyed named Germany, but a full quarter said they blamed “the confused international situation.”

More than 90% said they had no doubt that the Nazi Holocaust had really happened, but when asked how they viewed the political concepts of the Nazis, nearly a quarter--24%--said they were “not so bad at all.”

The German weekly Die Woche, which published the survey results, called this level of tolerance for Nazi ideology alarming and noted that the only good thing about such a figure was that it was smaller than it had been in previous surveys.

In 1955, according to Die Woche, almost half of West Germans said they would have considered Hitler a great statesman if he hadn’t tried to wipe out the Jews. In 1989, another survey turned up 46% of Germans saying they could find some good things about National Socialism.