[Zope] problems with non ascii char from an xml export

hi there, I try to read data from an xml export back into zope. however I have problems with non ascii chars. in the xml pickle I have a string like so: "dann \xfcberhaupt den zu \xfcbernehmenden" this sems to be an latin1 encoded string. whatever I try I do not get it converted such, that it is represented correctly in zope. what I would like to do is to store it in an CMF objext as description, and then retrieve it as object.description() in a template. thanks a lot for any pointer. robert