AltGr with Emacs 23 on OSX and German keyboard

[Stefan Kamphausen <skampi@gmx.net>]

Fellow Emacsers,

due to certain quantum shifts in the space-time-continuum I got a
machine with OSX running at home[1].  On that I manually installed Emacs
23.1 and AUCTeX to do some nice LaTeXing.  

Since I really dislike the original keyboard that came with that
computer [2] and since I want to have the keyboard-layout that is
printed on the keyboard [3] I plugged a common German keyboard into the
USB-port and fetched some keyboard-description file from the Internet
[4].  After that many things work as expected.

However, whenever I try to type a backslash (AltGr ß on a German
Keyboard) Emacs tells me that M-ß is undefined.  In fact this counts for
all keystrokes involving AltGr.  Those of you familiar with German
keyboards will know that this makes the following chars unavailable:
@\[]{}|~.  Try to do some LaTeX-editing without those.

I've waded the message-board-sea for hours, mostly finding posts that
say one should really try the apple-keyboard and their layout [5] and
have now spent 3 evenings trying to find a solution.  To no avail.

Does anyone in this group have a solution, an url or an idea?


Kind Regards,
Stefan



Footnotes: 

[1]  Boy, if you've been with Linux for >15 years this is hard to take
but that's not the story here.

[2]  And I *don't* want to discuss this like it's been done in numerous
messages boards, thank you).  After some 20 years of typing you just
know what's good for your wrists and what isn't.

[3]  No discussion either, please.  I've been through all that aeons
ago. 

[4]  Ridiculous that I can't just switch it, isn't it?

[5]  Obviously that's the reason for some bitter footnotes here.  


-- 
Stefan Kamphausen --- http://www.skamphausen.de
a blessed +42 regexp of confusion (weapon in hand)
You hit. The format string crumbles and turns to dust.