As a native german speaker, I can assure you that neither 'ü' nor ' ' are illegal characters.
Which character encoding does your data table use and what do you do on the client side to guarantee that all characters fall into the valid range?
If your database supports only ASCII characters (and cannot be changed), then you should be using System.Text.ASCIIEncoding which replaces all non-ASCII characters with '?' for you.
Better yet, escape the Unicode characters and represent them in some way that is compatible with the ASCII character set, e.g., use '\u9404', to represent Unicode character 9404, see RFC5137 for some methods of doing this and read the answers to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1615559/converting-unicode-strings-to-escaped-ascii-string.