Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (review)

Nicholas Saul presents another much-needed contribution toward the growing body of literature on the Roma in general and German literary history that silently and imperiously had appropriated Romany imagery in particular. His analysis outlines the early anthropological constructs of Romany origins and identity as seen in, e.g., the speculative anthropological investigations of Jacob Tomasius or Heinrich Grellmann, who worked with the trope 'Gypsy' rather than the historical Roma. The latter's work, which may be seen as the first among German anthropological studies to look at the Roma as a race, is portrayed as foundational work for later scholars and writers, in particular those of the nineteenth century.

For the period after Grellmann, Saul draws attention to the mostly ignored work of Franz Liszt on the Roma, Die Zigeuner und ihre Musik. With the help of Hegel's philosophy of art and his notion of epic literature Liszt gives a sensitive reading of the state of the Roma artistic expression without falling into Romantic stereotypes or Enlightenment paternalism. In contrast to most theories of the Roma of that time he acknowledges their unique contributions to Germanic culture which were made in their musical rather than literary creations. Saul sees a tenuous connection between Liszt's reading of Roma artistic expression and the literary works of Brentano, Keller, and Raabe through whose literary representations of the Roma he traces not only how they are perceived but also how the writers' definition of German identity changes in the course of the nineteenth century.

As an aside it should be noted that the analysis alerts to the fact that the production of all scholarly work under discussion has been done exclusively by non-Romany Germans. The appropriation of the 'Gypsy' in early literature seems to fall into two "chief modalities" of the genuine 'Gypsy' and that of the fake 'Gypsy.' The latter is traced back to Cervantes's Preciosa. Saul systematically examines the production and use of Romany voices by exemplary Romantic writers, such as Wolzogen, Arnim, Brentano, and Immermann. His meticulous reading of these writers reveals their responses to the 'Gypsy' anthropology of the time, reactions that range from reification to subversion of the cultural stereotypes. Against the backdrop of social and political ideas of the time, a second trend involves the 'Gypsy' as the exotic other often used as a negative foil to "healthy Germanness." Saul's introduction concludes with a discussion of two types of Zigeunerromantik, one negative in the tradition of Grellmann's racial stereotype, the other celebrating the 'Gypsy' alterity. Saul closes the discussion of the Romantic writers with a brief discussion of Mörike and Immermann's cultural pessimism, i.e., the view of the Roma as a doomed race.

The study looks at the realist response to German Romanticism in terms of an opposition, exemplified by Karl Gutzkow as the political activist on the one hand and Gustav Freytag as the conservative pragmatist on the other. For the realism of the one literary camp Saul discusses Theodor Storm's Immensee. The novella employs all the Romantic images of the Roma but with a realistic edge, which leads Saul to call its use of Zigeunerromantik "secularized." Stifter, by contrast, uses Romany imagery to create a symbol representing his dismay at modernity and yearning for a more classical aesthetic.

Perhaps because there is ultimately a complete disconnect between the Romany figures in Storm and Stifter and the actual Roma living in mid-nineteenth-century 'Germany,' Saul pauses his literary discussion briefly to outline a portrait of the Romany situation at that time. His focus centers on the term Heimat, the rise of the modern police force, and its progressively more virulent persecution of the Roma as the epitome of undesirables within the German-speaking principalities. With that in mind, Friedrich Hebbel is discussed as what seems little more than a representative of anti Gypsianism. Wilhelm Raabe's Die Kinder von Finkenrode serves as...