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 "Bottles", "Self-Portrait", "Ethos", Doones I, 4, 1971. "Signs", Greenfield Review 1, Spring 1970. "Infidelity", "Refrain", "For the Poor Devil Manfred Bock", "My God I Thought", "How Many Sons", "Washing Windows", "Confidence", "A Love", Modern Poetry in Translation, London, 6, 1970. 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