Thanks, that's exactly what I did. In the German translation the option is called: "Erlaube Sonderzeichen im Benutzernamen? ", which means "Allow special characters in Usernames" and the option is enabled.
My provider switched from one to another server last week. Could it have something to do with this fact (the user registration worked before). By the way: Im using version 7.5.2 with the German language pack from Zarzal.