wine users - Jun 2012 - keymaps and scancodes

Sorry if I re-ask a question, but I couldn't find a satisfying answer yet to
the following problem:

I installed wine on a UTF-8 Linux system, and everything works fine (running
Wine 1.3.something, currently).  But when I installed some games where you can
use ^(~ on german keyboards) to open a console, nothing happens. Even when I 
ported some windows games over - installed in wine, deleted gamedir, copied
gamedir from old windows installation - it does not work.  And it does not
matter if run wine as X11 wm or inside another wm.
Do I need to tell windows to use scancodes instead of the host OS's
keymappings? How do I do that?

Thanks for any idea.

Just to be correct: wine version is 1.3.36, and everything else works like it
did in a win98 or winxp system.
I just tried (again) disabling any input systems on system-wide level and using
the classic nodeadkeys map in xorg.conf, no change.
btw: I confused something -- ~ is the key on gb/us keyboards, on german ones it
is ^ (the one left of 1).  And it still doesn't work to call up the console
in the games where it ought to to so.