changing default collation

[marco milli]

hi everyone

running my webapplication against a mysql4.1.12a server, i have a problem ordering my query results. the data stored and queried is mostly in the german language and unfortunately my ä's (a-umlaut's) appear after the letter z. i have tried changing the default collation for my default latin1 charset, but the ordering of my queries do not seem to be affected. using mysql-cc i have tried the following alter statements
at both database and table level, but the following queries were not affected:

1) ALTER DATABASE `db_name` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_german1_ci

2) ALTER TABLE `table_name`
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_german1_ci

where is my wrongdoing? can anyone help?

thanks in advance

marco