Static member variable conundrum

Question

I'm using an abstract base class so that subclasses can share common functionality.
Each subclass needs a static member variable (a String) that needs to be accessed from the abstract base class in some of it's methods.
This is where the problem is; I would like to declare an abstract variable in the base class so that the base class methods can use the variable, but you can't make an abstract variable static.
Is there a way around this or am I approaching this problem from the wrong direction?

Answer 1

I can't remember if you can override static methodsTested this and determined that you can't. The superclass static gets called. Makes sense.
I also tested my suggested code, and made a few improvements ... maybe it isn't quite so ugly after all (can you tell that I'm slogging through some boring stuff?):
public class Tester1
    protected static HashMap _stringTable = new HashMap();
    static
        _stringTable.put(Tester1.class, "Tester 1");
    protected String getString()
        return (String)_stringTable.get(this.getClass());
    public static void main(String[] argv)
        Tester1 t1 = new Tester1();
        Tester2 t2 = new Tester2();
        Tester1 t3 = new Tester2();
        System.out.println("t1.getString() = " + t1.getString());
        System.out.println("t2.getString() = " + t2.getString());
        System.out.println("t3.getString() = " + t3.getString());
public class Tester2 extends Tester1
    static
        _stringTable.put(Tester2.class, "Tester 2");