Otto Hietsch, a native of Vienna born in 1924, is a man of many professional incarnations. In his upbringing, from early on, pragmatic and scholarly elements have been happily mixed. A graduated translator and interpreter at twenty-one, and a certificated teacher cum Dr. phil. at twenty-four, he went into tertiary education work in Austria, England, and Italy. For odd stretches of academic freewheeling, the young lecturer and lexicographer sallied forth to study elsewhere, at such cultural centrs and dictionary offices as Edinburgh, Ann Arbor, and Sydney.
In 1952, Dr. Hietsch was appointed Professor of German and English at Padua's venerable B•; and eleven years later accepted a call to the first chair of English Philology at Braunschweig Technical University, the oldest of ist kind in Germany. In 1967, the newly established alma mater Ratisbonensis invited him to return to the banks of the Danube. There Bavarian English, to the students' delight, has soon become one of his favourites, and that cavallo di battaglia, the reader can see, is proudly prancing still.