You could call Einstein one of those labels and it wouldn't be much odder than calling him German. He was actually born in The Kingdom of Würtemburg, at the be

You could call Einstein one of those labels and it wouldn't be much odder than calling him German. He was actually born in The Kingdom of Würtemburg, at the beginning of the "German Empire" (a federation of kingdoms whose borders were very different from today's Germany). And even then, what we now call "Germany" is something that only came into existence in the 1990s. A lot of people try to project nation-states backwards through history, but they're a relatively recent notion, and their current configuration even more so. Specifically, he lived in the German speaking part of two of those countries, and it doesn't make sense to refer to German-speaking regions of the late 1800s and early 1900s by 21st century labels.