Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

How old is your TeX installation, the name of the binary is now pdftex and no longer pdfetex

Seems to be somewhat older since pdftex is not known as executable. He says pdfeTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.11a-2.1 (Web2c 7.5.2) (I'm hopefully waiting for TL 2008 for updating the complete system.)

Use \mainlanguage[de], \language is just for local switches.

Thanks, that's it! Jürgen