-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/1112/wor11.htm
>>>And to think we devoted a half century and $$$Gazillion to combat
this type of Statist behaviour. Or, was it merely trying to stifle
the competition? A<>E<>R <<<
}}}>Begin
Monday, November 12, 2001
German teachers critical of US get 'Stasi treatment'
>From Derek Scally, in Berlin
GERMANY: 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 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 polic
y?" 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 agains
t 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-ye
ar 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 1
35,000 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 opini
on rights" and moved her to another school.
© 2001 ireland.com
End<{{{
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