Sunday was a day of celebration, solemn commemoration and loud demonstration all over Germany, as the country marked the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. Official activities like speech-giving and wreath-laying were offset by unofficial events like the mass protest against neo-Nazis in the center of Berlin. For all that was going on, it was sometimes difficult to keep in mind that the day was mainly a time to mark the passing of a dark chapter in history . On Monday, though, Federal President Horst Koehler's speech provides enough for newspapers to comment on.

As the left-leaning Die tageszeitung remarks, it wasn't an easy speech to give. "No one envies a president who in 2005 has to give a speech on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of May 8. The built-in expectations are almost impossible to fulfill." Koehler carried out his duty, and if his speech was not exactly "spectacular," maybe "that's the best thing you could say about it." It was, after all, hardly the time to hog the spotlight; instead, the paper writes, Koehler took the chance to rail against those in Germany who would like to rewrite history: "Shame, disdain and disgust: the terms he applied to national socialism leave no doubt about his basic position. That's enough." The paper says he was right to keep things simple, and agrees that, "'We' should never, as Koehler said, be 'needed' by the rest of the world. It's enough already if other countries no longer fear us."

The Financial Times Deutschland tried to put the speech in its historical context. "Federal President Horst Koehler knew very well that his speech on May 8 would be compared to a famous predecessor. Richard von Weizsaecker's speech on May 8, 1985 for the 40th anniversary of the war's end was a milestone in the historical-political debate of the old Federal Republic." (Weizsaecker was the first to call the Allied victory an act of liberation for Germany). Koehler went one step further, saying openly that Germans, too, suffered under Nazis and should be considered victims. In doing so, the paper writes, he took a new tack and chose to appeal directly to the younger generation of Germans to be distrustful of anyone who says he has all the answers, and to make sure that such suffering never happens again. "This is a clear denial of every type of forgetting or 'getting over it' mentality -- but at the same time is a notable disavowal of rigid canonization of history."

Weizsaecker's speech figures into the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's editorial as well. "More conspicuously than his predecessor, who still referred to the mass expulsions as 'enforced wanderings,' he included the imprisoned, the raped, the expelled and the abducted in his commemoration." Instead of seeing this has a grand historical precedent, the paper compares this to Russia's stance on the Baltic states. "This was not an attempt to 'relativize' German wrongs; it was a remembrance of the commandment of humanity. Sixty years after the end of the war, Germany has achieved sufficient sovereignty to face the entire picture of horror. This should surprise those who've always been asking for it the least."

The center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung, meanwhile, talks about the shift in the language used on the day of remembrance. "Koehler, for instance, said that Germany 'unleashed' the war. But thirty years ago historians and hysterians had already had a bitter debate over the word and whether or not it glossed over Germany's active role in war. The war wasn't simply sitting around, even if it was leashed; rather, the Germans single-mindedly started it on political grounds." The days ceremonies made it clear that "the further removed the end of the war becomes, the stronger the sense of being freed through defeat." Koehler talked about this in his speech, but then perhaps let his well-known pride in Germany get the better of him. "He overlooked, though, that there are many Germans who are truly fond of their native land but, at the same time, for whom national pride is a category of the past. For them, it's curious to hear the German president proclaiming his pride in Germany on the 8th of May of all days."

The business daily Handelsblatt says that while it is all well and good to look at May 8 as a day of liberation, it became that only for the West Germans. "The Allied liberation of Germany from the Nazi yoke was no act of altruism. And why should it have been?" For the Allies back then, they were simply trying to defeat a dangerous evil. "Exporting democracy wasn't yet on the security agenda six decades ago." In the east, though, "fascism number one was just followed by fascism number two," and for many eastern states not enough time has passed since the fall of communism to work through all the feelings about the end of the war. This is at the heart of the current tension between the Baltic States and Russia. "Yet for the Germans, there's no reason to start self-righteously pointing fingers. In the end, this dilemma is also an outcome that Germany is responsible for. Cause and effect shouldn't get mixed up."