X11 umlaut pasting

[Daniel Pfeiffer <occitan@esperanto.org>]

In GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2002-02-21 on pfdabpc
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: POSIX
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: de_DE@euro
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-9
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

I opened a file containing only ascii (modeline --:--) and started writing a text in german with umlauts (ä, ö, ü, ß) and pasted the text with the mouse to sylpheed (a Gtk+ 1 app).  All umlauts disappeared.  To my amazement the portuguese word abraço got pasted without a hitch!

When pasting the same text to an Opera (a Qt 2 app) textarea, everything works fine.  If I then mark and paste it from there to sylpheed it also works.

I must admit I don't understand codesets and languages (also how to type unicode) in emacs.  Maybe part of the problem is the lack of a good tutorial on this mysterious but very important topic!

best regards
Daniel