Michael Zimmermann. Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007. IV, 591 S. EUR 80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-515-08917-3.

Reviewed by Jennifer Illuzzi (Department of History, University of Minnesota)
Published on H-German (March, 2008)

New Directions for European "Gypsy" Research

Michael Zimmermann's edited volume on the relationship between scientific research and Gypsy policies during the twentieth century is a thorough, informative, and welcome addition to the small, but growing body of literature on Europe's Gypsy populations.[1] Unfortunately, Zimmermann, one of the few German historians openly engaging with the issue of Gypsies and the Holocaust, died before the publication of this volume. It emerged from a 2004 conference entitled "Between Education and Extermination: Gypsy Research and Gypsy Policy in 20th Century Europe" that discussed the connections between the role of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the genocide of Gypsies during the Nazi regime. However, the book's greatest strength lies in its comparative approach; rather than viewing the German mass murder of the Gypsies as a singular historical event, the book places the murder of Gypsies squarely in the center of a network of discriminatory policies throughout both modern western and eastern Europe. Interestingly, and perhaps controversially, the book does not use the term "genocide" to describe the killing of the Gypsies, and I am sure this choice will generate heated debate. In particular, Gunter Lewy's essay implicitly makes the argument that because their racial status allowed some of the "pure-blooded" Gypsies to escape extermination, the term should probably not apply here. Simultaneously, however, the contributors do draw out exactly what distinguished Germany's policies from other states' discrimination and marginalization of the Gypsies, and one of the key aspects of that difference lies in the close interaction between state power and science.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part lays out the issues in contemporary research on Gypsies in twentieth-century Europe and includes an excellent introductory essay by Zimmermann himself. For him, the central questions include the concept of the "Gypsy" in state policy and the self-definition of those labeled as such; the transition from a pre-modern to a modern nation and policy; contradictions and trends in modern Gypsy policy; the relationship between Gypsy policy and research; the political and social constructions that led to Nazi policy; conceptual changes in the term "Gypsy" since the late 1960s; and the political maneuvering of those labeled as Gypsies. The second part of the book deals with the international context of Gypsy policy and includes essays covering Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France. The third part deals specifically with the National Socialist era in Germany and most explicitly grapples with the relationship of the DFG to the extermination of Gypsies. Finally, the fourth section deals with the post-1945 period and the continuities and changes in Gypsy policy in Germany.

The book's agenda is certainly heady, yet the vastness of its reach is excused by the paucity of research on the topic generally. In particular, the field lacks research not colored by polemics in service of the nascent Roma political movement (which tend to leave out complicating issues of internal group tensions) or the view of even more nefarious anti-Gypsy politics (which considers extermination of the Gypsies during the Holocaust their "destiny").

While the section of the book that attempts to place German Gypsy policies in an international context is in many ways the most interesting and necessary part of the collection, it also incorporates some of its greatest weaknesses. Certainly, European Gypsy policy needs to be placed in a comparative context, and one of the subtexts of the book is that Gypsies are a European population. Rather than viewing Gypsies as a physically and spiritually separate culture, a more productive academic approach would be to locate them as a wholly European culture. This section of the book does succeed in making this point, but in a rather haphazard fashion. The essays skip across time, thus making comparisons between them difficult. For instance, Michael Stewart's piece on Hungary covers only communism, while Viorel Achim's essay on Romania covers the years 1920-50, and Elenea Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov's essay on Bulgaria focuses on the period from 1919 to 1989. This diffuse approach probably stems from the difficulty of finding sources suitable for comparison, but nonetheless makes the task of constructing a broad, comparative historical outline difficult. Another problem with this section is that few essays take an overtly comparative perspective: they focus on single nation-states and rarely link their policies back to German or other European policies in any substantive fashion. One exception to this trend is Leo Lucassen's excellent essay, "Gypsy Research and Gypsy Policy in the Netherlands (1850-1970) in a Comparative Perspective." Lucassen expressly contrasts the Netherlands' relative lack of scientific interest in Gypsies and focus on excluding foreign Gypsy populations with Germany's almost obsessive interest in Gypsy research and policy following the unification in 1871. He compares Dutch authorities' attitude toward Gypsies as a "foreign problem," since they had supposedly been eliminated from the Netherlands during the eighteenth century, with German authorities' opinion that Gypsies were an "internal" problem, which led to the monitoring and controlling of those Gypsies who had claims to German imperial citizenship. This comparison allows readers to place German policy in a wider European trajectory. Even so, it is odd that the international section lacks a contribution on twentieth-century Italian Gypsy policy, especially since Italian authorities cracked down on Gypsy populations during the cholera outbreak in 1910 and interned Gypsies under Benito Mussolini. The inclusion of interesting recent work on the Gypsies' history in Italy would have added significantly to the book.[2]

It is an uncomfortable task of the reviewer to point out problematic contributions in addition to strong ones. I found Viorel Achim's essay on Romanian Gypsy policy to be one the volume's weaker contributions. It slips between academic analysis and value judgments on Romanian policy: for example, Achim states that a Romanian ethnographer Ion Chelca "had no prejudice against the Gypsies," even though in one of his books during the war he includes anti-Gypsy statements (p. 161). Achim cannot verify any of Chelca's prejudices, nor does he offer evidence that Chelca's statements constituted mere pandering to the authorities, as he claims. Elsewhere, Achim states, "[g]overnment documents on the Gypsies did not invoke race as a reason for deportation," and "there are some other documents as well where authorities speak about the necessity of ridding villages and towns of the poor Gypsy population," yet offers no citations to support these statements (p. 169). In addition to this problematic contribution, two essays fit poorly into the collection: Jakob Tanner's historical overview of eugenics and racial hygiene and Imanuel Baumann's essay on criminology. These essays did not tie their themes directly to Gypsy policy, and other essays offer enough background on these themes while tying them specifically to the issue of the treatment of Gypsies in the twentieth century.

This work, on balance, however, offers many significant points for consideration in the debate about Germany's scientific research and policies towards Gypsies. First, it seeks to move the image of the Gypsy away from that of the "eternal victim." While Gypsies have almost always been marginalized and persecuted by authorities in Germany, Gilad Margalit argues that the postwar period witnessed some amelioration, even if only as an unintended outcome of Allied denazification policy. This shift in turn has opened the door for a nascent movement for Roma rights, and increased (if only marginally) respect for Romany populations. Other essays that emphasize the historical and contemporary political Romany movements are the essays by Marushiakova and Popov, Achim, and Stewart, as well as Denis Peschanski's essay on France and Zimmermann's introductory essay. This movement is the key to conceptualizing the future of Romany populations in Europe and to changing the paradigm of Gypsy as foreigner to that of Gypsy as European. The essays that discuss this point also stress the need for Romanies to overcome their own internal divisions in order to bargain for rights on a larger European scale, thus avoiding the picture of a monolithic or undifferentiated cultural and political outlook among the groups constituting the movement.

Second, another key point that emerges specifically from the essays on Germany is the comparison between the genocide of the Jews during the Nazi regime and the mass killing of Gypsies. An essay by Gerhard Baumgartner and Florian Freund on Austria, as well as Lewy's essay, supports the validity of the "cumulative radicalization" thesis for the Gypsies. Adolf Hitler himself was largely unconcerned with the Gypsies, and "pressure from below" began the move towards a policy of deportation and extermination for Gypsies (p. 299). This decision was also shared and enforced by many different sources of authority within the regime. Rather than simply blaming Robert Ritter's research alone for contributing to the eventual murderous policies of the Nazis, the essays in the third part of the collection show the synergy of Ritter's scientific research, Heinrich Himmler's Ahnenerbe research, criminology, and local officials in formulating a decision making process that led to deportation to Auschwitz. This diffuse, decentralized operation of power is a superb illustration of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality at work. Power operating on various levels and in several directions, not merely through an abstracted "state," led to a murderous outcome for many of Europe's Gypsies during the Nazi period. Eve Rosenhaft's essay offers an excellent example of this point: Lower-level Nazi officials and party members had pushed Himmler and Hitler to "do something" about the Gypsy plague (p. 299). This urging led Himmler and Reich authorities to give the police forces permission to deport Gypsies to Auschwitz. The police used the information about Gypsies' close family ties provided to them by research facilities like Ritter's institute to increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of the operation by deporting intact families and interning them together.

Notes

[1]. In this review, as Zimmermann and most of his contributors do throughout the book, I will use the term "Gypsy" to refer to the category of persons referred to by authorities as "Gypsies." It refers not only to people who might self-identify as members of an ethnic Romany group, but also to those labeled as Gypsies who would not have considered themselves to be of Romany origin.

[2]. Some recent works on Italian Roma include Leonardo Piasere, "Antropologia Sociale e Storia della Mendicita Zingara," Polis 14 (2000): 409-430; Leonardo Piasere, I Rom D'europa: Una Storia Moderna (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2004); Leonardo Piasere, Stefanie Pontrandolfo, and Carlotta Saletti Salza, eds., Italia Romani, 4 vols. (Roma: CISU, 1996-2004); and Stefania Pontrandolfo, Un Secolo di Scuola: I Rom di Melfi (Roma: CISU, 2004).

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Citation: Jennifer Illuzzi. Review of Zimmermann, Michael, Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14346

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