Brown pastures
Sir: Charles Fyffe (Letters, 30 September) writes: 'Born 20 April 1889 in Vienna, he was christened Adolf.' Hitler was Austrian, but not Viennese. He was born in the Innviertel district, near the borders of much less gemiitlich Bavaria, in a small town called Braunau. This means 'brown pas- ture', but did not influence his choice of excretory brown for the party colour and Braunes Haus for his HQ: he copied that from Richard Wagner (who kept a Braunes Buch and inspired the term Entatige Lbsung for the Jews). The Nazis were ridiculed by the socialists right from the beginning as the Scheisshauspartei, the shit- house party. No wonder Hitler was drawn to Eva Braun.
History might have taken a different course if only his parents had settled a few miles away, in a village called Fucking. Had he been born there, surely no anglophone could have taken him seriously. It is a merry corner for the British tourist: within heiling distance of Braunau and Fucking are places called Petting, Necking, Sodding and Wank (just north of Garmisch, where Hitler liked to relax); even Smiling and Wind-Passing. Our dromophile local authori- ty freeloaders, so obsessed with 'twinning', should not neglect these places; and a Magi- cal Mystery Tour for members of the British National Party seems overdue.
A man who researched the surnames of the region found numerous families called Hiedler and Hader, of both of which Hitler is a variant (i and a and t and d sounds are often exchangeable in Austrian pronunciation) and all come from Hiitte, a but — or 'cottage' — which indeed brings us back to the Scheisshauspartei.
Fritz Spiegi
4 Windermere Terrace, Liverpool
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