Three German teachers say they have been unfairly punished for expressing allegedly anti-American sentiment after the September 11th bombings.
The teachers, from the eastern German state of Saxony, complain their treatment is no better than the punishment of dissenters in East Germany for their anti-state views.
"One sentence almost cost me my entire existence, a single sentence," said a teacher identified as Ms Petra S. to news magazine Der Speigel. "It will remain stuck to me like a piece of chewing gum." She says the sentence she is alleged to have uttered, "Finally America has been given a warning," was a quotation from the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
But parents in the Saxon town of Hohenstein-Ernstthal were enraged by her declaration and sent faxes and letters calling for the school board to remove the teacher, which they did shortly afterwards.
She says she was not brainwashing her students with anti-American propaganda but teaching them to think critically.
"Is it un-American to think about America not in connection with George Washington, but rather with the McCarthy [communist trials] and the electric chair?" she asked. "Is it anti-American when I criticise US foreign policy?" She says it reminds her of her university years in East Germany, when fellow students spied on her for the secret police, the Stasi. "When you criticised something in East Germany, it immediately meant, 'you're against us'," she said.
Ms Ursula S., a 41-year-old teacher in Dresden, agrees. "Are teachers here going to be muzzled again like before?" she asked. She was punished after a student asked her "why America is hated so much".
In her answer, she remembers describing, among other things, the Vietnam war, the atomic bombs detonated in Japan, and the Gulf War. A parent "blew the whistle" on her, she says, and reported her to the school board. "He could have come and talked openly to me. But no, the other way round, like before."
Ms Christa B. (56), taught for 34 years in a town near Dresden until shortly after September 11th. "Now the Americans know what it feels like . . . after all they bombed our Dresden," she allegedly told a class of nine-year olds. One pupil told her mother that "teacher thinks what is happening to the Americans is right." The mother informed the school.
"I know it was a mistake to express myself that way in front of the children," she said. But she holds to her opinion that the attacks were as unjustified as the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies in 1945 that killed 135,000 people and destroyed over 80 per cent of the city.
"My husband practically suffocated from phosphorous gas, the River Elbe itself was on fire," she said. But the school board said her "attempt to justify the terrorist attacks in a school is not covered by freedom of opinion rights" and moved her to another school.
