Cannot read German characters via FileInputStream

From: Zsolt (unknown_at_nodomain.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 19:01:20 +0100

Hi,

the German characters will be replaced with question marks when I read a
file using FileInputStream unless I set the LANG environment to "en_US" on
Linux.

export LANG=en_US

How can I fix the problem without setting the LANG environment variable ?

Zsolt