character encoding

[Lustig, Marc (Allianz Deutschland, externer Mitarbeiter)]

Continnum (running on JBoss/RedHat) rejects to display special chars (german 
Umlaute) in the proper way.
Both text entered in the web-UI (e.g. user full name) and files retrieved from 
the SVN-repo are displayed with corrupted special chars. The web-page is 
displayed properly as ISO-8859-1.
 
I suppose some configuration entry is necessary in one of the Continuum-related 
config-files.
But which one?