mutt's pager and 8 bit chars

[Mirko Parthey <Mirko.Parthey@Informatik.TU-Chemnitz.DE>]

Hi,
I can't figure out how to make mutt's builtin pager
display characters >= chr(128), e.g. German Umlauts (ÄÖÜßäöü),
they are shown as question marks.

Mutt's "charset" option is set to "iso-8859-1". For the headers,
you can take this message as reference.

After setting the "pager" option to "less", these characters are being
displayed just fine, but I don't really want to use an external pager.
Pine also has no problems displaying the message.

Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for any help,
Mirko