aspell and special characters

[Sebastian Schubert]

Hi,

I want to use aspell with emacs and so I put the following lines into
my .emacs:

(setq-default ispell-program-name "aspell")
(require 'ispell)

The problem is that I can't check words which include special characters
like äöü (Umlaute). I tried the dictionaries "german", "german8", "deutsch"
and "deutsch8". emacs shows me e.g. Färbe as a correction possibility, so
it looks like an encoding problem to me. I use a Suse 9.2 system (utf8) and
a self-compiled emacs 21.4.1.
However, running aspell in a shell on the same file works well, ispell works
in emacs too.

What can I do?

Thanks
Sebastian