Nicolaus Copernicus is known that Copernicus knew Polish on a par with German and Latin. Historian Michael Burleigh describes the nationality debate as a "totally insignificant battle" between German and Polish scholars during the interwar period. Polish astronomer Konrad Rudnicki calls the discussion a "fierce scholarly quarrel in ... times of nationalism" and describes Copernicus as an inhabitant of a German-speaking territory that belonged to Poland, himself being of mixed Polish-German extraction. Czesław Miłosz describes the debate as an "absurd" projection of a modern understanding of nationality onto Renaissance people, who identified with their home territories rather than with a nation. Similarly,
Nicolas Born Nicolas Born Nicolas Born (31 December 1937 in Duisburg – 7 December 1979 in Lüchow-Dannenberg) was a German writer. Nicolas Born was – together with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann – one of the most important and most innovative German poets of his generation. His two novels, "Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte", and "Die Fälschung", have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and count among the most important works of German literature of the 1970s. Nicolas Born grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the Ruhrgebiet. He worked making printing accessories in a chemical process for a large printing company