Heidelberg University Publishing

Even after 1945, Sinti and Roma were confronted with marginalisation and discrimination, as antigypsyist prejudice structures continued to guide action, especially at state level. This study examines the state apparatus in Baden-Württemberg and its minority policy up to the 1970s, addressing three main topics (compensation, legislation and the legal punishment of National Socialist crimes of violence). The focus is on how the authorities dealt with the survivors of the Sinti and Roma and their perspective on their experiences of state persecution and extermination under National Socialism.

Countering antigypsyism in film is the problem field which this edited collection inaugurates. The aim is to shift the focus from antigypsyism critique and open up alongside it a new set of discussions about the artistic counterstrategies to antigypsyism, highlighting the need for intertextual, transcultural, and transmedial approaches in the analysis. The contributions foreground the applicability of the research findings and provide a broad range of examples, which may be useful to filmmakers and professionals from the film industry.

The volume documents the case studies presented at the international workshop “Artistic Alternatives to the Antigypsy Gaze” held in Heidelberg in 2021.

This book deals with a neglected area of the judicial reappraisal of the Nazi regime: the handling of the crimes against the Central and Eastern European Roma minority in West German NSG trials. It provides a comprehensive insight and overview, informs about the legal prerequisites of the West German judicial special path, and presents the course of proceedings and the roles of the defendants, witnesses and judicial personnel for a number of proceedings. The focus is on the joint trial on the “Zigeunerkomplex” (“Gypsy Complex”, 1958–1970), which was planned as a major trial alongside the first Auschwitz trial and which, contrary to its goal, had little impact and is now forgotten.

The study ventures into a topic that has been so far largely neglected in film studies: the ‘gypsy’ phantasm on the big screen. It reconstructs the history of ‘gypsy’ representations in film since the birth of the medium providing a systematic film-theoretical analysis of their aesthetic and social functions. Based on a corpus of over 150 works from European and US cinema, it is shown that ‘gypsy’-themed feature films share the pattern of an ‘ethno-racial’ masquerade, irrespective of the place and time of their origin. The author thus expands the research, concentrated until now in the field of literature, with another art form, film, opening up new dimensions of (popular) cultural antigypsyism.

Visual media have played a key role in the genesis of antigypsyism since the early modern period. This interdisciplinary anthology examines the central motifs and semantics of "Gypsy" images in various forms of representation such as literature, visual art, photography, postcards, opera, theatre, comics, film and computer games. Particular attention is paid to connecting lines and interrelationships. The contributions uncover the content-related, temporal, geographical and media-specific manifestations of one of the most powerful stereotypes in European cultural history. To this day, antigypsyist imaginations have a negative impact on the positioning of Sinti and Roma in European societies.

Drawing on a number of paradigmatic works of art, the book explores the motif of ‘gypsy’ child-theft and its visualisations. The analytical focus is on the colour coding of bodies in texts and images and their racialised/anti-gypsy uses. Offering a comprehensive survey of the motif’s adaptations to different visual media, the author elaborates on its multiple layers of meaning and functions. The analysis starts with a critical review of Cervantes’ tale “La gitanilla”, moving through seventeenth-century Dutch history painting to take a cursory look at nineteenth-century printed images, and end up with an annotated filmography of 49 cinematic works.