What output do you get? On Perl 5.22 under Darwin (Mac OSX) your code produces:

Use of the encoding pragma is deprecated at 1140209.pl line 8.
abc123äöüß
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On the other hand this code:

#! perl
my $str = "abc123äöüß";
print $str;
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outputs as follows:

$ perl 1140209.pl
abc123äöüß
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