I agree in general but here is the thing. I come to the conclusion that this is related to my locales on the Ubuntu machine that is running this particular site. All i could make out so far was that the ENV VARS

are set to en_US even if they should be en_US.UTF-8 or POSIX.

On my local system i run apache on gentoo (yeah i know) and all related ENV vars are set to POSIX and the default output on STDOUT in mod_perl is UTF8. I get the job done with perl ... but this makes me sick. If i get that solved i will report back