Problem with german umlaute

[Philipp Schulte]

Hello,
I am using GNU Emacs 21.3.1 on a GNU/Linux system and I have many 
troubles with characters like ü,ö,ä,ß and ¤. If I start Emacs on the
console, everything is fine and I can type those characters and they
are displayed correctly. 
If I start Emacs while using X a new windows is created and those
characters work, too. But if I start Emacs from an aterm with -nw 
none of those characters work, even though they do work in the aterm.

For example pressing "ü" makes Emacs display this: 
"Shell command on region:"

Pressing "¤" gives a 
"Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell".

Obviously this is wrong. I just don't understand why every single editor
that I tried (including vim and several Emacs clones like qemacs or zile)
can handle those characters just fine without changing any settings.
Any hints? Thanks,
Phil