The Roma: A minority in Europe. Historical, political and social perspectives

The book under review is a collection of essays arising from a conference held n Israel in 2002, although a number of the articles included make reference o events after 2004 and so have evidently been subsequently revised. The book brings together a number of leading authors working on Romani history, and in particular on the history of Roma in the 20th century, including Erika Thurner, a leading scholar on the Romani Holocaust in Austria; the late Michael Zimmermann, a historian of state practices and the Holocaust of Roma in Germany; as well as a number of others. There is a strong accent on articles about persecution and the Holocaust.

The first part of Shulamith Shahar’s contribution to the collection attempts to set out a pre-modern view of “otherness” in Europe, with little reference to Roma. Thereafter the article describes shifting approaches to Gypsies in Europe since the early modern period. Shahar describes fluctuations between, on the one hand, treatment of Roma/Gypsies as an ethnic group and, on the other, denial of ethnicity in favor of a vision of Gypsies as a random assortment of thieves, vagabonds and other rabble. A footnote explains that “The study is intended to free the Gypsies from their isolation in historical research by comparing their image and status to that of other marginal and minority groups, and locating their story in the history of Western Europe in the Early Modern period” (p. 15).

Peter Widmann’s article is a terse, interesting discussion of the role of theories of criminal biology in influencing first judicial, and then police practices, particularly in Germany, and particularly as they were brought to bear on Gypsies. Criminal biology identified the roots of criminal attributes in unchanging, biologically determined traits, increasingly linked to ethnicity. Beginning with a discussion of the late-19th-century theories of Cesare Lombroso, Widmann follows their growing influence in Germany in the late 1920s as well as their continued influence even after World War II, particularly via police-training materials in Germany. At the height of their influence, theories of criminal biology drove harsh punitive measures, including forced sterilization and arguments in favor of life-long incarceration. Widmann observes that pre-Nazi theorists and practitioners of criminal biology were not necessarily Nazi, racist, or even on the political right. Lombroso was, according to Widmann, both socialist and committed to multiculturalism.

Erika Thurner’s short contribution is more or less a summary of her previous work on Nazi policies and actions in Austria, which have appeared inter alia in book form (Thurner 1998). Deprived of the details of the Romani Holocaust in Austria—which include thoroughly perverse chapters such as the temporary stay of deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau of a group of Roma detained at the Maxglan camp by the film crew of Leni Riefenstahl, who used them for work on the filming of Tiefland—the essay has something of an overly general or superficial feel, particularly when compared with her longer work. It is also limited by some vague moments such as the following:

In March 1938, near the time of the Anschluss, Austrian National Socialists in the Burgenland initiated the first independent measures of persecution: forbidding children to attend school, prohibiting the playing of music as a profession, banning ‘Gypsies’ from voting, restricting their movements and, notably, subjecting them to forced labour under the surveillance of SS- and SA-squads.

(p. 57)

It seems odd that a historian of Thurner’s caliber would be contented with the phrase “near the time”, rendering unclear whether the measures took place before or after the Anschluss, a detail which would seem important. Her general approach seems to be that it is difficult to disentangle German and Austrian National Socialist policies and actions, but this leads the essay to at times blur the Holocaust generally with events in Austria.

Michael Zimmermann’s essay, by contrast, is very precise, even while covering an extensive range of material, and also apparently aims at a new contribution to ongoing debate. Zimmermann’s point of departure is an unfortunate debate driven by several academics, including in particular the historian Guenter Lewy, who appear intent on reserving the terms “Holocaust” and or “genocide” for the treatment of Jews during World War II. Zimmermann begins his intervention into this discussion with the seemingly unpromising start of seeking to compare the treatment of Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war—seemingly unpromising because Jews and Roma/Gypsies had been components of the Nazis’ racial ideology since they came to power in 1933, whereas Soviet prisoners of war followed only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. However, in the course of a series of formally wellcrafted and meticulously supported arguments, it emerges that this is precisely the reason for the comparison; Zimmermann concludes by noting that while Roma/Gypsies sat on a lower rung of the Nazi racial obsessions than Jews, they certainly fell within categories reserved by the Nazis for inhuman treatment, and in practice this was crucial. In his conclusion, Zimmermann first establishes why social scientists should take positions on issues such as the legal assessment of genocide (a matter of apparent dispute), and then demonstrates that the treatment of Roma/Gypsies by the Germans and their allies falls within the legal definition of genocide. Zimmermann’s essay is also valuable for presenting, on pp. 36–40, one of the richest and factually accurate summaries of the Nazi persecution of Roma/Gypsies available in English.

The contribution by Katalin Katz, on the Romani Holocaust in Hungary, is also set against a dispute, this one a local argument between Janos Barsony and Laszlo Karsai. Shortly after 1989, Karsai published accounts of the Romani Holocaust which, according to Barsony and other Hungarian Romani activists, belittled the Romani Holocaust. The general background is that the Romani Holocaust in Hungary—at least as of the time of the conference at issue—had been badly documented for a number of reasons linked among other things to Communism’s preference for downplaying the ethnic persecution aspects of World War II. Katz’s essay does important work rescuing the town of Komarom as a site of Holocaust memory for the Romani Holocaust, and she provides some interesting oral history and a psychological model for historical memory. It would have been helpful if Katz had presented some of Barsony’s and Karsai’s material in the course of their dispute about the Romani Holocaust in Hungary. She quotes Karsai—the figure at the centre of the storm—only to show him denigrating the quality of the memory of his research subjects, the Romani victims of the Holocaust.

Viorel Achim has in recent years published the most important history of Roma in Romania now available in English. The essay included here develops his work in this area by exploring the reaction of non-Roma in Romania to the deportation of Roma to the territory of Transdniestria during World War II—the major act of the Romanian Romani Holocaust—undertaken by the Antonescu regime. Achim presents an interesting body of archival material, in particular a series of letters and petitions written primarily by non-Roma, requesting exemptions from deportation for particular Roma. However, his conclusions—the central one being “… it seems safe to say that most Romanians did not support the government’s policy toward the Gypsies during World War II” (p. 97)—are flat and unsatisfying. Left unprobed is the possibility that there might have been broad support for deportation policy generally, with requests for particular interventions for individuals. The implication would seem to be that, in Achim’s view, deportation policy was a curious aberration dreamed up solely by Antonescu himself and perhaps a few deranged associates, with no roots whatsoever in local sentiments. It is tempting to set Achim’s work in a context of post-Communist publics—and scholars—not yet prepared to explore with any level of vigor the interface between authoritarian practice and public complicity.

Gilad Margalit and Yaron Matras’s essay concerns the development of the Sinti identity in post-World War II Germany. They examine Sinti reactions—including the institutional reactions of Sinti- and Sinti-dominated organizations—to the emergence of international Romani organizations, Romani nationalism, and the arrival of numbers of non-German Roma in Germany. They also examine conceptions of who the Sinti are, both those emerging from within the community and those arising from wider discussions among Romani intellectuals in the international Romani movement. Perhaps surprisingly, in a volume focusing on “The Roma: A minority in Europe”, this is the only essay included here to devote attention to Roma as anything other than the object of persecution, and it is among the only materials included to examine Roma as enabled social actors. It is among the most interesting of the essays included in the book.

Eva Sobotka’s contribution addresses post-1989 policy responses by several post-Communist states in Central Europe to respond to international pressure to improve the situation of Roma. She summarizes a range of European regional policy developments and notes that pressure was more successful in the cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia than in Poland, where international attention to the situation of Roma began only later, toward the end of the 1990s. She presents several pieces of important documentation on legislative efforts by Czech lawmakers to attempt to force Roma to go to Slovakia in the context of the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and 1993, as well as a 1992 effort by the Czech prosecutor to be granted sweeping powers to enter and investigate any flat inhabited by persons considered badly behaved.

The short essay by Pal Tamas attempts to cover a range of propositions without doing sufficient justice to the more substantive and contentious of them. Since a number of assertions made in the essay are questionable, the lack of presentation of supporting evidence tends to matter. He contends, for example, that after 1989 “the Romani elite in the Czech Republic, for instance, appeared most combative” (by comparison with the Romani elite in Slovakia and Hungary) (p. 165). Since it would be possible to reach the opposite conclusion as well, discussion and support for this claim would have been helpful. Similar is his conclusion that since the accession of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the European Union “it is no longer clear who exactly is continuing and in what form the philosophy of Brussels Roma policy” (p. 173). Again, further support would be required for this claim, particularly since the opposite may also be true.

The essay provided by the editors of the volume, Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago, seems exemplary of the strengths and weaknesses of the volume as a whole. On the one hand, it is in this essay that a comparison of the key role of the massive trauma of the Holocaust on the subsequent social and political histories—and historical memories—of Roma and Jews is brought fully into the open. This, it seems to me, is the central idea guiding the volume as a whole, and a specific contribution in this area is welcome.

On the other hand, the essay leaves the impression either that the authors know the Romani part of the subject only from third-hand accounts, or that Roma are making an appearance as representative of something—in this case a study of the formation or non-formation of national memory—rather than on their own terms.

Stauber and Vago begin with a graceful summary of the fluctuating, evolving and initially ambivalent relationship between official historiography in the new State of Israel and the Holocaust, particularly as the massive effort by the German state to destroy the whole of the Jewish people. Key questions for the first generation of state-building Zionists hinged around what role to give this (or indeed any) persecution in the process of creating the new Israeli. As soon as they move on to the link between the Romani Holocaust and historical memory, however, the discussion becomes two-dimensional and cliché-ridden. For example, “the Roma have no written history or even a clear historical consciousness” (p. 122). An effort to compare promotion of the legend of Maccabaeus in Israel with the theory of Romani origins in Rajput defenders of India from Muslim invaders is not pursued to the level of impact on the respective groups. At one point, the authors quote one sociologist approvingly, noting that he “lived among the Roma” (p. 125). This effort to establish the legitimacy of the citation only serves to heighten the sense that, for the authors, the subject is hopelessly exotic and distant.

Also hindering Stauber and Vago’s essay is, among other things, an apparent unawareness that “Porrajmos”—the term they use for the Romani Holocaust— is rejected by major segments of the Romani community as completely unacceptable to describe the events of the second World War, because in a number of dialects of Romani it is a term associated with rape; is obscene; is unmentionable in mixed company; and is regarded as highly inappropriate in the context of memorializing the events of mass murder. Similarly mysterious is Stauber and Vago’s repeated placement of the term “Holocaust” in quotation marks when referring to the Romani Holocaust.

In the end, the title of the book is something of a misnomer, insofar as only a limited number of the essays have much to say about “Roma, a minority in Europe”, other than as an object of persecution. Readers seeking information on other aspects of Romani existence as a minority may be disappointed. Perhaps in keeping with the genre of conference collections, the quality of the published material is mixed. Nevertheless, it can provide an important introduction to a number of areas—particularly those concerning the persecution of Roma. And, as noted above, a number of the essays make important contributions and are worth seeing in detail.