Why doso many German names have “von” with the last name?
It literally means ‘from’ and usually it signified nobility, and should be spelled with a small v “von”. In Germany, there is a distinction between historic nobility (historischer Adel), i.e. knighted by a king or the Emperor and the citizen nobility (Bürgeradel), which derived their von from the pure description of a place of origin, e.g. Gerhardt Schmied von Ehringen (Gerhardt the Smith from Ehringen). Historic nobility has the right to abreviate the von as v. (e.g. Lothar Freiherr v.Richthofen), whereas the citizen nobilty has to spell out the “von”. In Switzerland, von is mostly a description of place of origin, because from 1191 on, nobody could be elevated to a rank of nobility. Some exceptions are immigrants or locals knighted by foreign powers outside the Swiss Federation (e.g. von Habsburg). In Austria, “von” can mean either a place of origin or nobility.
