[Dovecot] Problem with sieve and german umlauts

Dear list, I?m running a postfix (2.5.6) / Dovecot (1.1.11) on a Centos 5.2 box. I?ve written a small gui application to simply create Out of Office replys with sieve. The resulting code did work with maildrop without any problems. Now sieve fails when it meets any german umlauts like ä or ü. It just stops compiling the scripts and complains about the missing "};". A simple fix is to just replace the umlauts, but that doesn?t meet the expectations of my users. Is there any escape code I could use or any way to place the mail text outside the script?

Best regards,

Mike