2) In Serbia you don't have to feel indebted when someone offers you a drink. I believe this is true for many "old-school" cultures. I realize it might seem intimidating or aggressive but don't fear. Just have a drink ;)
3) Nikola Tesla was Serbian. And yes he was born in Croatia (there are lots of us)... but I have a feeling your host would've been more offended had you replied "Who?". Either way you made it out of there in one piece didn't you?
The confusion came about for two reasons. 1. that Krajina became part of Croatia (that part of Yugoslavia) and 2. the old unifying Yugoslav government claimed Tesla as one of their own, and they did what they could to rid of ethnic divides so referred to everybody as 'Yugoslav' (or 'Yugoslav from Croatia' etc.).
This gets even uglier with the recent war where nationalists from all sides attempted to claim historic figures and celebrities as their own in an effort of ethnic superiority propaganda. (The funniest example of this was the President of Croatia leading an archeological dig in a part of Croatia where he discovered that the Croatian nation pre-dated the Roman empire - it got really messy). This really muddied the waters.
Most people in the region are pretty chilled out now, though - as a Serbian I have no problem with Croatians referring to Tesla as 'one of us', just as I often refer to Croatian football players as 'one of mine' (being from the Balkans). There is a lot more that unites us as a people than divides us.
Don't be so sure.
During the recent war they burned his memorial house and destroyed the monument in front of it. They also demolished his monument in the nearby town of Gospic at the beginning of the recent war and it appears they don't want it back: http://bit.ly/JnSQkg
In Croatian schools, they always say Tesla was Serbian and born in Croatian territory. Both Croatians and Serbs are proud of him, I guess.
As for mutual hatred, many people lost their families in the war, and obviously many Serbs were part of the aggression, so the relationship is no wonder.
Anyway, the article is great! Just what I needed.
The hatred dates well before the 1990ies. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp. The more you know, the less you want to know.
EDIT: OK correction, Wikipedia says it's also spelt rakia .. although I've never seen it written that way.
Of course, since he was born into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and studied in Graz, we might as well let the Austrians take credit, as the Austrians really need it (what's Austria's greatest accomplishment? convincing the world that Mozart is Austrian, and Hitler is German!)
But really, he did his best work as an American, so USA! USA! USA! :)
Oskar Morgenstern: German
Ferdinand Porsche: German
Valier: never heard of this guy until I looked him up just now; a true Austrian - albeit born in Italy and worked in Germany. Damned shame he died so young.
Karl Popper: Jew
Ludwig Boltzmann: the second real Austrian on this list.
Christian Doppler: another real Austrian...
Ernst Mach: Volksdeutsche from what is now Czech Republic.
Wolfgang Pauli: Czech-Jew, and related to Mach.
Kurt Gödel: German AMERICAN, F YEAH!! :)
Gregor Mendel: Volksdeutsche, from Silesia (now part of Czech Republic)
So I see only 3 Austrian on this list!
P.S. the Brits/Finns/Ukrainians/Russians always make a good joke at Germans' expense, but Austria always gets a free pass... I'm trying to right that wrong! :)
If you are going to assert that Jews cannot be Austrian, you may as well go all the way and give Hitler credit for being Austrian.
Due to changing borders, I'm not attributing Austria-Hungary's borders, but people who held Austrian citizenship after the breakup or resided in Austria proper were Austrian, regardless of where they were born. I'm ignoring the notion that Jews can't Austrian.
"Nikola Tesla was born to Serbian parents in the village of Smiljan, Austrian Empire near the town of Gospić, in the territory of modern-day Croatia. His baptismal certificate reports that he was born on 28 June (N.S. 10 July) 1856 to father Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church.[12] His mother was Đuka Tesla, née Mandić, whose father was also a Serbian Orthodox priest."
It doesn't get any more Serbian.
The other several billion do not give a shit, even under the most promising of conditions, because they have real, actual, human problems in their modest, meager, live-a-day lives.
Are you fucking stupid, sir? Or are you simply ignorant? Do you not understand this is the very meta-issue that finds itself under debate? Are you incapable of abstract thought?
Two Caucasians (ethnicity) who are US citizens living in China gives birth to a baby in China, then the baby would be Caucasian (ethnicity), and American (nationality, by US law), but probably also Chinese (nationality, by Chinese law[1]).
Maybe that example is not so great because the baby would have dual-citizenship, so consider a different example:
3rd generation Chinese immigrants in the US who are born in America, never left the US to visit China (same as their parents), it is their grand parents who migrated from China. These 3rd generation immigrations are Chinese (ethnicity) and US citizens (nationality), also called Chinese-Americans (format: [ethnicity]-[nationality])[2]. These Chinese-Americans are not citizens of China, but they are ethnic Chinese.
Hope that clears up that one small point.
[1] Most countries have a 'if you're born here, you get our citizenship automatically' (I'm not sure about China specifically, just using it as an example).
[2] easy to mix up and confuse, but order matters here
That principle is called 'jus soli'[1], and is far from universal. Only ~15% of all nations confer it. A few more grant it under restricted conditions. China is emphatically _not_ one of those countries.
The term Caucasian is highly confusing as it's a racist term invented by the same German who came up with Negroid and Mongloid, and is - as far as I know - only used in the United States. In fact, the Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Indians were "Caucasian", but were not white.
Also, China is a bad example, as Chinese is not an ethnicity, it's a nationality as China is a multi-ethnic nation. The ethnicities being Han (what most people consider to be "ethnic Chinese", Hui, et al.
So presumably Tesla was a Croatian-Serb, or possibly a Serb-Croatian, and whether or not those two groups get along doesn't really affect that definition. I mean, I fully understand that it is a touchy subject, but I don't really think that it affects long dead physicists very much.
It's still American.
(At least to us Europeans) what matters is the culture of the parents/kid, not the nationality or the ethnicity itself.
A 3rd generation Irish-American is an American, not an Irish, and a 3rd generation Chinese-American is by all means an American too.
Really I suppose I got the wrong idea in my head because Italians are much more familiar with their naval neighbor Croatia than further-away Serbia :)
So I walk into a bar in Belgrade, Serbia. Turns out to be a private party, lot's of drinking and merry-ment but my girl and I felt a bit out of place. Just before we turned for the door a man pulled me by the shoulder to the bar and started asking what we were doing there, real intimidating-like.
He said we could have drinks on him but I felt a little like we didn't want to be indebted to this guy. On the other hand I felt I had no choice.
He had asked me what I'd studied and I mentioned physics. He got the bar-tenders attention, got me a drink, and asked me "so... you say you know something about physics... tell me: 'what nationality was Nikola Tesla?'"
I responded "Croatian" of course. Suddenly the faces of the man, the bartender, and (so it seemed) the rest of the bar too went very gloomy, eyes piercing into me like shots of raiki (the liquor they drink).
I learned that night that the Serbs claim Tesla was a Serbian who lived in Croatia. The Croatians and Serbs (who hate each other very much) both claim him as their national heros.
Lessons:
- if you're in Serbia, Tesla was a Serbian (and a god)
- if you're in Croatia, Tesla was a Croatian (and a god)
- if you're anywhere else, well I guess now I know he wasn't god