How to code the german "ß" in Latex

How to code the german "ß" in Latex

I've read lots tutorials how to code "ß" in Latex. Unfortunately none of
them could help me. Here is my code:
\documentclass[11pt]{amsart}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{letterpaper}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\usepackage[encoding]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
daß
\end{document}
For encoding I have tried so far: latin1, latin9, utf8, applemac. All of
them crashed with "undefined control sequence". I'm using TexShop on
MacOSX 10.6. TexShop itself uses utf8 encoding. I've checked that. So, how
do I get "ß" WITHOUT typing {\ss}?