Date input format vs date output format

Is there any way to set the INPUT format of dates independently from the
OUTPUT format of dates??

Background:
I am currently in a German context, so I did 
<#setting locale="de">. I want all date output to be in the German date
format, i.e. "dd.MM.yyyy".

However from my data model I have the following input format for dates:
"dd-MM-yyyy".

When I tried to access a date from the data model, it was displayed as-is,
i.e. as "dd-MM-yyyy".
Then I tried to force Freemarker to parse it as a date using ?date. I got
"unparseable date" as a reply.

Then I did
<#setting date_format="dd-MM-yyyy">.
With this setting and using ?date, freemarker accepted the input as a date,
but the output was again in the format "dd-MM-yyyy".

I then reformatted it to the correct format using ?string, but this is not
what I want, because I want to reuse the template for different locales,
i.e. I do not want to have locale specific settings while I process the
data.

I did find a solution to my problem, but I am not sure if this is very
elegant. In the beginning I do

<#setting date_format="yyyy-MM-dd"> -> set INPUT format
...if current locale is DE then...
<#assign output_date_format="dd.MM.yyyy"> -> set OUTPUT format

and while processing my data I do 
(some date)?date?string(output_date_format)

This works, but if there is a way to avoid writing
?date?string(output_date_format) behind each and every date, I would be
glad. Guess my solution is also not very performant.

Ideas?



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