Can't write in 'Pne' or 'Pico' in german, by "RedHat 8.0"

Hi,

hope i don't 'go on your nerves' with this question; but may be there is 
a german too in this group!
Cause the problem is, that i have no chance, (also i've been marched 
through the internet to find a solution!) to write  these german  
'special' letters, like 'ae' and 'ue' and 'sz'. That was no problem by 
"RedHat 7.3" before. 'Abiword' and 'Gimp' i could gave into the right 
expression with calling by: 'env LANG=de_DE.UTF-8' or 'env LANG=c'. But 
i have no chance to read e-mails in 'Pine' there is given '?' instead of 
the right character-set, ( in '.pinerc' there is given 
'character-set:ISO-8859-1'), although by typing these letters in 'vi' 
too it seemed everything is allright, but after printing i can't read 
these letters.
May be someone has found a way to 'write' also in german, by "RedHat 8.0".

I would be lucky, if i could be informed!

Best Regards

Thomas Rump