Greg Hildebrandt, New York, New York, cinematographer
Jeremy Schonfeld, birthplace unspecified, American singer-songwriter
J. Kent Edens, Johnson City, Tennessee, editor
Lee Grossman, Hastings, Minnesota, Twins fan
Maria Luisa Mendonça, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, actress
Sam Nicolary, San Raphael, California, cipher
Sylvia Kollek, Klosterbrück, Poland, German “Idol” judge
Tripp Weathers, Shelby, North Carolina, member of Wilmington, North Carolina scene
Vasil Siskov, Skopje, Yugoslavia, actor
I became fascinated with the birthplace of Sylvia Kollek.Throughout my labors on this page to date, I’ve been fastidious about listing countries of origin according to how geopolitics hung together in the year of everybody's birth.Thus the USSR, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, for instance, have all made appearances as birthplaces over the course of this month.Fraulein Kollek, a music producer best known as a former jurist on “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, has a listed birthplace of “Klosterbrück, Upper Silesia, Germany”.From there it becomes rather complicated.
Upper Silesia was an administrative jurisdiction of the Prussian Empire.It lies deep within the boundaries of present-day Poland, incorporating also a bit of the Czech borderlands.Klosterbrück appears to be a tiny suburb of Opole, Poland.Even though it’s totally Poland, there’s a decent sized population in the hinterlands of that city that consider themselves entirely German.(This article doubles as a useful summary, and another example of the kind of thing Wikipedia can do very well..)
So for giving me cause to contemplate the odd circumstance of a minority German community isolated in the midst of modern southern Poland, Sylvia Kollek, du bist den heutigen Gewinner.
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