a note on gellert’s nationality
I headcanon Gellert’s origins as Austro-Hungarian, with an Austrian father and a Hungarian mother. My reasoning is that the name/spelling Gellert, actually Gellért with an accent, is much more commonly Hungarian rather than German, with Szent Gellért (Gerard of Csanád, d. 1046) as one of the patron saints of Hungary. Gellért Hill in Budapest is named after this saint. The typical German variant of the name Gellert/Gellért is Gerhard.
Gellert’s surname, Grindelwald, refers to a village in the canton of Berne, Switzerland, so it is reasonable to assume he has ancestors there. However, the Habsburg family, who had ruled Austria from 1278 (Battle on the Marchfeld) until 1918 (when Emperor Charles I of Austria “renounced participation” in affairs of the state), was also originally from Switzerland: Their originating seat is Habsburg Castle in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland. I’d like to think that Gellert has a distant Swiss heritage in common with the (then still) ruling family of the multinational empire he was from.
