Is the name Adolf still common in German-speaking countries?

I have no idea but when I was very little, my paternal grandfather had a parrot named Adolph..this was pre-Nazi Germany and the parrot talked a lot. He knew all the names of my uncles (my grandfather’s sons).

@Mamradpivo I don’t know for certain, but “Adolf” is not a terribly unusual name.

That is, we still name people “John” (John Wilkes Booth), “Guy” (Guy Fawkes), “Lee” (Lee Harvey Oswald), “Joseph” (Joseph Stalin), etc.

I wouldn’t have thought it would be harder to find a job with the name Adolf. Getting through school would be pretty tough though.

I think the chances are high that the name would be rejected by authorities. redacted. It is not banned, but parents usually don’t choose it because of the negative connotations (in germany, names for babies can be legally rejected if they are deemed to cause disadvantages for the child, e.g. if it results in bullying. i can almost hear the kid being teased with hitler jokes)

Mattbrowne would know.

@grumpyfish: Oh, come on, You can’t compare John, Lee, Joseph, or even Guy to Adolf in terms of notoriety. You’re kidding, right?

@ragingloli: There is a couple in New Jersey who named their child Adolf Hitler, and then tried to sue Walmart I believe for refusing to put the entire name on the child’s birthday cake. There’s no name rejection here in the states.

@poofandmook
i hope the kid puts the parents in a retirement home as retribution for ruining his life.

and for this combination, i assume hitler would be the middle name, would almost certainly be rejected in germany. which i personally think is a good thing.

Notably, “Adolf” is not in the list of top 500 names in 2008 in Germany, so I suspect it’s not a common one. (http://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/2008-top500)

@poofandmook What I’m saying is that “Adolf” is not a particularly strange name in a Germanic country. It may (I’m in the states, I have no idea) have taken on the connotation of being associated with Adolf Hitler since then, but it’s entirely possible that it didn’t.

@poofandmook I heard about that kid. All we can hope is the child is disgusted when he is old enough to understand, but probably the cards are stacked against that.

@ragingloli: their daughters are named Joycelynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler. And I stand corrected… they’re from PA. the Walmart was in NJ.

@grumpyfish I thought about the Joseph Stalin aspect too, but Joseph is a name popular throughout the Western world, coming down to us in various forms from the Bible. I don’t know the origin of Adolf, but it seems pretty specific to German names, and I can’t think of any notable people with that name in the second half of the 20th century.

The thing about this kid is they named him Adolf Hitler. If his name was Adolf Becker, we would probably just be surprised people use the name Adolf with the history attached to it, but not be horrified.

@Mamradpivo Apparently the name is fairly stimagtized (the Wikipedia article on Adolf says that pretty much other than the Italian version Adolfo has been in decline since WWII.

Which means that I was indeed wrong =)

It’s an old name in Sweden. There are still people named Adolf. Not that common though. People are still named Josef too.

It’s not about the name, it’s about the person that inhabits it. Names should not be sullied by their occupants. Notorious names such as Adolf , Sadam, Augusto, Nickolai etc. should not fall into disuse because of the ‘bad apples’.

@lloydbird: lots of things that shouldn’t be are.

@poofandmook
It would seem so.

Not sure, but Adolfo is still pretty popular in the Spanish speaking world.

No, it’s not common. And believe me, a young person would have a hard time to get a job with a German company as well. I’m irritated by this phrase ‘getting a job with a non-German company’. Why would it just matter to non-German companies?

As @ragingloli said the name is not banned, but for many decades parents simply don’t pick this name anymore. Of course there are many people born in 1941 for example, now 75 years old, with the name Adolf.

If that kid from New Jersey ever travels to Germany he would be arrested right at the airport when showing his passport. Anything that has to do with direct promotion of Nazism is illegal. Even denying the holocaust is illegal. There are people who tried this and they had to pay hefty fines. It’s this one exception where freedom of speech is restricted in Germany.

A good website about names was mentioned earlier. And here’s all you need to know about Adolf:

http://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/4501-adolf.htm

It’s in German, but you will understand the graphs. Here are a few key points:

The decline started in 1942. The name almost disappeared in 1951 already. Before that it was especially common Bavaria and neighboring Austria as can be seen from the phone book statistics in 1999. In 2006 among 27,700 babies there was 1 case with Adolf as a second name. Not necessarily with neo-Nazi parents. There could have been other reasons. The name Adolf actually means noble wolf.

@mattbrowne

I can’t see someone getting arrested for having Adolf as their forename… Are there any reports of this happening or is it purely speculation?

@sebastian_von_tulu: The kid’s name isn’t just Adolf. His middle name is Hitler.

@poofandmook Doh! I totally misread @mattbrowne‘s answer. Apologies. I’m doing that too often lately.

I still have some doubts as to the validity of the comment though.

@sebastian_von_tulu – No problem. Adding Hitler to Adolf causes the issue.

It dropped out of popular baby names in the early 1950s, as this German baby name site documents (note the cool little trend graph)
http://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/4501-adolf.htm

It’s worth noting that the drop in popularity began long before the war ended, as early as 1940/1941.

That’s in German, so if you don’t (I don’t) speak German, here’s what I used to read it.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.beliebte-vornamen.de%2F4501-adolf.htm&sl=auto&tl=en

I think it says that amongst nearly 28 000 babies born in Germany in 2006, only one had the name Adolf – and that was as a middle name. There’s also a forlorn rant by a grownup who curses his parents for giving him the name Adolf – here’s the machine translation:

“You can imagine the reactions of people, wherever I show up with that? Either amused or embarrassed, but everyone, yes everyone noticed it immediately and asked what my parents are thinking to name me so. Adolf, that name is somehow always been bad for me, yet I never read banish the name because it belongs to me, as I was just baptized.”