Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments On 9 January 1957, less than twelve years after the end of the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies, the Administration and Construction Committee of the local parliament (Landtag) of the German state of BadenWu ̈rttemberg debated a bill for the regulation of vagrancy. The bill, proposed by Joseph Vogt, a member of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU), was inspired by the Bavarian Law concerning Vagrancy (Landfahrerordnung ) of 1953 and was designed to limit the free movement of Gypsies in the state, supposedly to defend the inhabitants from the Gypsies ’ alleged criminal activity. In the middle of Vogt’s speech, a member of parliament from the opposition liberal party, the Free Democrats (FDP), Emmi Diemer-Nicolaus, rose to her feet to express her objections. The bill contravened the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of the Federal Republic and was an example of unacceptable overlegislation, she said. Vogt, no doubt irritated by his colleague’s interruption, responded by saying that he wished a wagonload of Gypsies were placed in front of her home so that the housewife in her would triumph over the lawyer.1 In other words, as soon as the sensible humanist was confronted with the concrete expressions of Gypsy existence, she would abandon her abstract and unrealistic ideas and would support a drastic solution for the “problem.” Vogt’s argument did not persuade Diemer-Nicolaus and her colleagues to support his legislation in the Landtag at Stuttgart, however, and his attempt failed. The conflicting viewpoints of Vogt and Diemer-Nicolaus reflect two German approaches to Gypsies in the aftermath of Auschwitz. The xi Preface and Acknowledgments question is which of them more truly represents the “German attitude” toward this Nazi persecuted and despised minority—the conservative bigot or the enlightened liberal? The study of German preoccupation with various aspects of Nazi persecution of Gypsies and its implications for German society, culture, and institutions can afford us perhaps not answers but at least a perspective on two central and interlocked questions that have intensely engaged the minds of both Germans and non-Germans since the collapse of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945: How did Germans confront and come to terms with their own Nazi past? Was there in the “New Germany” any continuity of institutions or patterns of government activity that had existed before the collapse of Nazism? In the late 1980s, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) elicited a lively public debate in the former East and West Germany about confronting and coming to terms with Communist dictatorship . In the 1990s, this led to revival of public and academic discourse on how Germans coped with the Nazi past, especially in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and of the GDR.2 Historians and other participants in this debate reached varied and different conclusions. The predominant view in liberal and leftist circles was that German society and its various institutions found it very difficult to cope frankly and courageously with their Nazi past. In a book entitled Die zweite Schuld oder von der Last Deutscher zu sein (The second guilt, or the burden of being German), published as early as 1987, the German Jewish author Ralph Giordano asserted that, in addition to their guilt from murdering Jews, the Germans had a “second guilt” because “Hitler was defeated only militarily but not ideologically.”3 On the other side, German historians of the new right, such as the young historian Manfred Kittel, contradicted this assertion. In Die legende von der “Zweite Schuld”: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in der Ära Adenauer (The legend of the “second guilt”: Coming to terms with the Nazi past in the Adenauer era), Kittel referred directly to Giordano’s accusation. Although Kittel did not deal explicitly with the case of the Gypsies, he claimed that, in comparison with other post-Nazi states such as the GDR and Austria, the FRG as a state and German society in general had coped properly with the moral, political, and judicial aspects of its Nazi past. He denounced the claims of the kind Giordano made as a political myth created by the German left during the 1960s.4 The debate on the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) is part of an academic and public discourse on the political and social meaning of the aftereffects of Nazism, which has been ongoing in Germany since 1945. Most experts regard 1945 as a profound turning point in German history.5 In...