Talk:Gottfried von Einem

Righteous among the Nations
Gottfried von Einem is not listed in the list of Austrian Righteous dating from Jan 1, 2011 published by Yad Vashem. Gugganij (talk) 09:22, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * And we would be able to view this listing where? Varlaam (talk) 23:04, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The previous Yad Vashem link is dead, but I've replaced it with the entry in the Righteous database (as well as adding a piece to the article itself).Davidships (talk) 13:22, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

His surname in practice
Do we say "von Einem's work" or "Einem's work" in English?

I say the former; Britannica apparently says the latter.

One is shorter. Varlaam (talk) 23:02, 18 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I've noticed that in Britain - on the BBC and in magazines such as Opera and Gramophone - Herbert von Karajan is always called Karajan, not von Karajan. A German friend of mine who speaks very good English also says Karajan.  Americans tend to say "von Karajan".  Grove Opera (article by Erik Levi of Egham, Surrey) lists Gottfried von Einem under E, but calls him Von Einem! --GuillaumeTell 11:01, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
 * FWIW, it is almost never correct today to list a German name as if it began with the particle "von". In the past English practice was different from what it has become today. The Chicago Manual of Style, section 7.9, warns that in Italian, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, "The frequent older practice was to retain and capitalize the particle when the surname was used alone. Consequently, for many names the form with the particle is the only familiar one and must necessarily be used". The list of illustrative examples following this warning, however, gives only one example where "von" is sometimes included and may possibly be capitalized in English contexts—Friedrich von Steuben—and two where it never is—Alexander von Humboldt and Maximilian von Spee. (The Wikipedia articles on all three of these gentlemen consistently present their surnames without the "von".) What people may actually say out loud when speaking of musicians such as Einem of Karajan is another issue, as is the accepted way of presenting their names in informal running text. Guillaume Tell may be correct about there being a difference between American and British practice in such informal contexts, but there is no difference in indexes and bibliographies, nor should there be in careful, formal writing. To my (American) eye, the quoted phrase "von Einem's work" looks entirely wrong, and omitting the "von" is less likely to cause readers to stumble than including it will do.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:43, 19 August 2011 (UTC)


 * To Guillaume: I certainly say Karajan. I'm Canadian but I listened to a lot of US radio (Buffalo, New York) in the 1980s. "Karajan" is not necessarily a conventional case though, since to anyone familiar with German, it doesn't look German, because it's not. It's Greek (from generations back).
 * Einem is also an odd case since "einem" is a vocabulary word. Perhaps that's why I'm reluctant to say Einem; it's an indefinite article and does not sound like a name to me. (Four years of high school German, Grades 10 through 13.)
 * To Jérôme: I can't imagine Von Steuben (one of the bad guys, from our perspective) without his Von, and his article in fact does use a lot of Von.
 * The Pursuit of the Graf Spee. Yes, no Von there.
 * My inclination is to call him von Humboldt. But that could derive from books I read in the 1970s.
 * Ok. So "Einem" it is, even though it still sounds a bit queer to me. (There's a word that's dropped out of the language since boyhood.)
 * Varlaam (talk) 03:28, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * And there's Humboldt University in Berlin, not Von Humboldt University. --GuillaumeTell 08:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure. I simply agree that our usage in the past was different, and things are better now, since we no longer have to worry about whether von, van, et cetera are capitalized in a given context. I fully embrace Humboldt and his Universität.
 * I renamed my Einem template in light of this von-deprecating discussion.
 * Karajan. By purest coincidence, a friend yesterday mentioned a friend of his, yet another engineer. That fellow's dad, decades ago, was involved in a road accident with Herbert. Herbert got out of his car and said, in German, "Don't you know who I am?! I am Karajan!!"
 * It fits our picture of the man. Varlaam (talk) 19:01, 26 August 2011 (UTC)