"RFvW" == Ruprecht Freiherr von Waldenfels writes:

 RFvW> I´m trying to typeset a predominately German document with
 RFvW> Russian example sentences. I decided using Babel to do this,
 RFvW> using the TeX-Live distribution issued in 6/2000.  This
 RFvW> involves a switching of inputencoding as well as of
 RFvW> fontencoding, since I want to be able to use the German Umlaute
 RFvW> \"u, \"a, etc directly. I´ve tried a few variants, none seem to
 RFvW> work. Can anyone help me? I´m fairly new to TeX.

how do you want to input cyrillic and german non-ascii characters?
you said that you want to input german umlauts directly (i.e. without
macros like \"u). what about cyrillic? do you have a possibility to
input cyrillic text directly?

you have some choices:

1) store your LaTeX files in utf-8 input encoding, and use the utf-8
   support files from
   CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/supported/t2/etc/utf-8/
   (look into test-utf8.tex, which contains an example with both
   german umlauts and cyrillic letters in the same document)

   you can define a command
   \DeclareTextFontCommand\textcyr{\fontencoding{T2A}\selectfont}
   and use it similar other commands like \textbf, etc:

   German (Deutsch Süd) Grüß Gott \textcyr{Russian (Русский)
   Здравствуйте!}

   [you will need to have a mailreader understanding utf-8 encoding to
   read the above line]

2) input german text in some 8-bit input encoding (e.g. latin-1), and
   input cyrillic letters in 7-bit encoding. for this, you should
   include OT2 option to fontenc, and use commands like

   \def\cyrtext{\fontencoding{OT2}\selectfont}
   \DeclareTextFontCommand\textcyr{\cyrtext}

   German (Deutsch Süd) Grüß Gott \textcyr{Russkii0 Zdravstvui0te!}

3) you could also save your files in a mixed input encoding and switch
   between latin-1 and e.g. koi8-r (do not forget to switch also
   fontencoding from T1 to T2A). for this you will need to get the
   current base LaTeX if you will need to switch input encoding within
   the same text paragraph.

Best,
v.