strategy for character sets

[sjefjans]

Hello there,
I am trying to create a website with 4 languages: English, Dutch, German, French). My mysql database is set to character set utf-8 collate utf8_general_ci.
I pick the texts from the database and display them in the website. In the header of the page I set:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-15">
When using English and Dutch and French there is no problem at all. With German I seems to have to set the charset in the meta tag to utf-8 to display the characters correctly.

I can make the charset metatag dependent on the language used, but is this normal procedure? When the texts inserted in the mysql db are encoded to unicode (as is the case when the columns are set to utf8) do I have to decode the texts? And why is unicode not the best choice for German??
Thanks, Sjef😕

[sjefjans]

To further on the strategy:

should the strategy be:
1) encode plain text to unicode before saving it in the mysql db.
2) when retrieving is: decode text before displaying it.

Providing unicode is suitable for Dutch, English, German and French !