I looked at his signature on Wikipedia. You can see that he spelled it “-oe-“ and not ”-ö-“. Or perhaps he left out the umlaut and it was spelled “-öe-“.

But is it a non-phonetic spelling? I know that English is particularly bad in this respect.

Four points, in response to Roman: 1) You misspelled his name in your first post, as his signature clearly shows “oe.” (You wrote “ö.”) 2) You are using Google translate, with some unknown algorithm, rather than a book published by a major publisher. 3)You still didn’t address the possibility of the name not being spelled as it is pronounced. Whether “oe,” here, is pronounced as a single sound is not the question. Is that single sound the one these letters would normally make? 4) If I were wrong, so would be the first reply, Hermes. Who thinks that it would… Read more »

That makes sense. What you said initially was unclear. It seemed you might have gotten the pronunciation from Google Translate and/or from the spelling. My book had said the rhyming with “bubbles” was the closest, restricting it to sounds present in English. I wanted to give something English speakers could pronounce. If German is your first language, I’ll defer to you. I think a monolingual English speaker can be considered to be pronouncing it “correctly” if he chooses the closest out of “gubbles,” “gebbles,” “gurbles,” and “gerbles.” This is why I said it rhymes with “bubbles.”