Topic awaiting preservation: php: decoding special chars

hello, im saving html code in a database, where i encode special characters into html entities. mainly for the sake of german ä,ö,ü,ß,...

now in order to read out the html code from the database, i try to do:
html_entity_decode(htmlspecialchars_decode($text, ENT_QUOTES))

but unfortunately it decodes all my entities and that is also the html-brackets. how can i avoid that those are decoded? thanks!