German characters in English locale

[Peter Robinson <peter.robinson@t-online.de>]

Hi all,

I like to have my environment in English but need to write German texts 
using latex. The typical

\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} % deutsche Sprachunterst�tzung
\usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc} % Zeichencodierung Windows
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}


does not work. If I type a German character such as ä and try to compile 
with pdflatex, I get:


[PDFLaTeX] finished with exit status 1
./Word-LaTeX-Vergleich2.tex:36:Command \textcurrency unavailable in 
encoding T1. ...ender Weise. Dies ist die \LaTeX-Version.}
(...)
[PDFLaTeX] 1 error, 0 warnings, 4 badboxes

I then tried to reset the locales to include both english and german 
(using dpkg-reconfigure locales), but get

>dpkg-reconfigure locales
(Set to en and de...)
locales-all installed, skipping locales generation


What is going on? Any tips? THanks
-Peter