Germany is very densely populated but mostly smaller towns and cities and people tend to stay put more, so there's a lot of local history/memory. Imagine small towns where a generation ago everybody knows several people that died in the war and those who stayed home experienced other hardships. The US has been spared this mostly, but even the US smaller scale foreign wars had a toll on military members.
I grew up in Germany, and up until the FIFA World Cup in 2006 I can't remember seeing any person fly a German flag outside their house! Nationalism was a very frowned-upon thing, mostly for "Neo-Nazis", understood to be a slippery slope that lead to wars. The same goes for politics, there was great debate every single time German troops were deployed abroad before ~2010, see eg [1].
But things may be changing, AfD is gaining more and more popular support indicating an uptick in nationalism to me and a stronger feeling of international "importance".
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/07/28/g...