What does 'static' mean in this Java code?

Question

I have basic knowledge of Java and fair amount of experience working with other OOP languages, but this code still looks very strange to me. Can you help?

public abstract class Hello
{
    protected static Name name;
    static { /** what does this mean? **/
        name = null;
    }
}

Answer 1

It is a static initialization block, in which you initialize static class members.