Daniel,

Salzburg was bombed heavily during the war, as well as nearby Attnang Puchheim (small and unimportant except for the railyards), Linz, Vienna, and Wiener Neustadt. Austria’s nominal losses were of course much lower than the much larger Germany’s, but, depending on the source of your figures, per capita military deaths were about the same as in Germany (5% of the population ) and the rate of daeth among its soldiers was much higher than the Germans (between 35-50%, depending on the source).

Austria didn’t get the brunt of the loss during World War II, if I recall my history correctly. Was Vienna bombed like Berlin was?

In 1988, to commemorate Austria’s annexation by Adolf Hitler fifty years earlier, a new play was commissioned from Thomas Bernhard. The author of eleven novels and more than twenty plays, Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country’s most provocative postwar writer: he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which, with typical bluntness, he once represented as a pile of manure on the stage. At first, he declined to participate in the commemoration, saying with caustic humor that a more appropriate gesture would be for all the shops once owned by Jews to display signs reading “Judenfrei.” But the author of plays like “The German Lunch Table,” in which family members gathered for a meal discover Nazis in their soup, could not resist such a rich opportunity to needle Austria’s political and cultural élite. “All my life I have been a trouble-maker,” he once wrote. “I am not the sort of person who leaves others in peace.”

The scandal of “Heldenplatz,” the verse drama that was Bernhard’s contribution to the occasion, began well before opening night. The play takes its name from the Vienna square where cheering crowds greeted Hitler in 1938; that square also happens to be across from the Burgtheater, Austria’s most prestigious theatrical institution, where the play was produced. The action revolves around the suicide of an Austrian Jew who, returning to Vienna after having fled during the Second World War, is dismayed to discover anti-Semitism still simmering in the country. After the press got hold of the script, which included lines such as “There are more Nazis in Vienna now / than in thirty-eight,” politicians on the right, including Jörg Haider, called for the director’s expulsion from Vienna. For the première, on November 4, 1988, the Burgtheater was put under police guard. At the play’s finish, according to Bernhard’s biographer Gitta Honegger, a “dissonant ovation” of “shouting, booing, clapping, and whistling” went on for forty-five minutes.

The hostility of the response surprised even the pugnacious Bernhard. Some of his friends said that the episode hastened his death, which occurred, by assisted suicide, three months later, when he was fifty-eight. (He had suffered from lung ailments since his teens, and spent the last decade of his life under constant medical supervision.) But he managed to have the last word. His will, released shortly after he died, forbade the publication, the production, or even the recitation in Austria of his works, “including letters and scraps of paper,” for the next seventy years, the duration of their copyright. “I emphasize expressly that I do not want to have anything to do with the Austrian state and that I reject in perpetuity not only all interference but any overtures in that regard,” he declared.

The village is known to have existed as “Fucking” since at least 1070 and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; thus Fucking, in this case, means “place of Focko’s people.

Note that Snopes reports the Mayor has high hopes “that further thefts will be avoided through the use of increased concrete and . . . bigger screws.”

Isn’t there just the slightest chance they know this name puts them on the map and attracts more tourism than any other name they could choose?

Ronan, if you go, you have to get a picture of yourself standing next to the sign.

I’m going…