Umlaute: self-insert-command ("o) vs. Meta-v

[Peter Daum <gator_ml@yahoo.de>]

Hi,

... it looks, like after decades of 8-bit charsets, there still
is room for lots of confusion. I am just struggling with a weird
problem, that is driving me crazy:

- I am sitting on a (Gnu/Linux/Debian) machine running X11 with
   (mostly) German keyboard
- on which I have an "xterm"
- in which over an SSH session there is "screen" running on a remote host
- in that screen session, there are 30 terminal sessions on other hosts

I can't discover any significant differences in terminal or other relevant
settings on the remote machines. In shell sessions and other programs, they
all behave alike (i.e. when I press for example the "o key, it is displayed),
so it must be an emacs issue (even though the emacs configuration also should
be mostly the same on those machines and at least I can't find a significant
difference):

On some hosts, when I press "o, emacs sees the corresponding char and does
whatever that key is bound to (normally "self-insert-command") while on
other machines the same single key press is seen by emacs as Meta-v.
I have been using emacs for 20 years, but all my past experience won't
help because the input handling just changed too much during the last
years. Does anybody have an idea, what exactly is going on here?

Any help is appreciated!
Regards,
                              Peter Daum