Talk:Christoph Waltz

Waltz' citizenships (Austrian & German by birth / naturalized US)

"Waltz was born in Vienna to a German father who applied for him to become a citizen of Germany after his birth." My English ist not the best, but I think his father didn't "applied" for him to become a German citizen. In fact, the German Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz ("German citizenship act") states that only the father's citizenship determines the citizenship of the child when it is born as a legitimate child for all births from 1 January 1914 until 31 December 1963; I don't know the Austrian legal status an that time, but I suggest that it was similar. So his father didn't apply the citizenship for him, Waltz was simply German by birth. --Bessawissa94 (talk) 17:44, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

In fact, the German version of this article it is also said that his German citizenship was determined by birth.--Bessawissa94 (talk) 17:46, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

According to his statements in Bill Maher's Real Time TV show, Waltz is now also a naturalized US citizen. (Question: does a TV interview suffice as a source for WP?) However, the issue of his citizenships at birth hasn't been addressed in all these years. The external Austrian source, which contains false information (see below), probably didn't help and prevented this WP article from being corrected. Dual or multiple citizenships are always a hassle, because in most countries a natural born citizen can only have one citizenship at birth, with no allegiance to any other nation, with (in principle) no laws necessary to govern citizenship. For example: born in Austria to two Austrian parents? That's basically the only clear-cut case anywhere. For all the other possible cases of a child's status at birth there are sovereign laws on statutory citizenship. The case at hand is luckily also quite clear-cut, or—dare I quote Waltz—even "banal": Waltz at the time of his birth was automatically a statutory citizen by the iura sanguinis of both Germany and Austria—patrilineally German and matrilineally Austrian, in the latter case possibly also by ius soli due to his birth in Vienna, though I don't know if there is any Austrian law regarding ius soli. (Ius soli would be secondary anyway in these two nations, especially in the 1950s.) But no matter what, children still need to be registered with the authorities—in Waltz' case with both German and Austrian authorities—for the state to recognize them as citizens for administrative purposes, especially when born abroad. (In Waltz' case, his citizenship either wasn't registered with the Austrian authorities, or it was, but never acted upon in later years.) So "apply to become a German after his birth" is a completely false description, because he had always been German from birth anyway: instead, "register his German birth citizenship" would be correct. Therefore the wording in the Austrian article (wienerzeitung.at) is wrong and misleading, and it should only be used very superficially as a source for this article. The source is also wrong in one other instance: Waltz did not "become an Austrian citizen", i.e. he didn't receive Austrian citizenship in 2010 decades after his birth, which would be a naturalization—and he's only a naturalized citizen of the US. In reality, he had always been a statutory Austrian citizen at birth, and his status was only recognized or registered or acted upon belatedly, a quick and "banal" administrative act with delivery of his first passport. (By the way, this happens a lot in Europe, e.g. Germans with one migrant parent suddenly returning from vacation as half-Italian or half-Spanish etc. decades after their birth, while in reality they had always been dual citizens. So Waltz may not be a traditional natural Austrian or German citizen, but quite the usual modern European citizen.) Nota bene: since in most countries the mother is the more important and often only relevant parent regarding a child's citizenship, when it comes to ius sanguinis, also to a defining extent in Austrian law, his Austrian citizenship should be regarded as his primary one at birth, even if chronologically his German citizenship had been the first one fully administered, even more so because he was born, grew up and was educated in Austria, as Waltz himself has emphasized many times. His new US citizenship should in my view be regarded as his overall primary citizenship, because it was his own wish and decision to become an American later in life. So the article's leading sentence should read: "Christoph Waltz (German: [ˈkʀɪstɔf ˈvalts]; born 4 October 1956) is an American-Austrian-German actor." 89.14.7.127 (talk) 09:54, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi, shall we omit Waltz's nationality in the first sentence as we've already done in Tina Turner, Elon Musk, etc? It's covered in the "personal life" section. Btw, sorry for edit-warring with other users. Thedarkknightli (talk) 07:29, 16 April 2024 (UTC)