Cannot access columns with german umlauts in Larav

Question

I use an existing db on our SQL-Server 2008 with Laravel 5.

Many tables and columns contain german umlauts. I've set the charset of the connection to "utf8" and can access tables like Läger without problems. But I couldn't access columns with umlauts. Every query returns something like

["Stra�e"]=> string(15) "Mainzer Str. 97" 

instead of

["Straße"]

I've tested it with charset utf8 and latin1 but it's always the same result.

Any idea how to fix this without changing the existing db?