On 19 August 2025, a new standing forum for discussion and policy making on issues affecting the Sinti and Roma communities in Lower Saxony was formally launched. The event, organised by the Lower Saxony Association of Sinti and the Roma Center / Roma Antidiscrimination Network and hosted by the Hannover City Council, took place in Hannover’s historic town hall.
The Runder Tisch (Round Table) is the result of years of work on the part of our project partner, the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, under the leadership of Mario Franz, which resulted in intensive discussions with the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture starting in 2024. It points to a new era in relations not only between Romani communities and the regional government and other public stakeholders, but also within the Romani population itself: Sinti from families resident in Germany for over 400 years and Roma whose families have arrived as refugees and migrants since the 1990s are represented at the Round Table, and work together to represent shared interests while acknowledging differences of history, culture and social circumstances. Also at the table will be representatives of government and public agencies in the cultural and educational spheres. Any of the parties can summon a meeting to discuss matters of common concern, practical solutions to specific problems and – perhaps most important – the financial framework required to support the social, cultural and civic flourishing of Romani communities.
The event was attended and addressed not only by Mario and the Chairman of the Roma Center, Kenan Emini, but also by the leaders of other local and national Sinti organisations and the national associations of German Sinti and Roma, by the mayor of Hannover and local and national parliamentarians, and by the curators of museums and memorial sites. Eve Rosenhaft, who has been co-opted as a member of the Round Table, spoke about the importance of researching, teaching and exhibiting Romani history. She made a plea for capacity building in the communities and the creation of sustainable co-managed institutions for archiving and studying the Romani cultural heritage.
In this blog, RomMig Co-Lead Tamara West introduces the interactive 1906 ‘StoryMap’
One of the key events informing the RomMig project is the 1906 migration of two hundred German Roma and Sinti to the UK. Entering ports in Scotland and England on steamships arriving from Hamburg, the visitors caused a political and public stir. During their 8 months stay they formed smaller groups and undertook several concurrent sub-journeys. Some followed the horse fair calendar with the aim of trading horses. Others undertook song and dance performances at local theatres. The event was referred to in the press and in public debate as the ‘German Gipsy Invasion‘.
Understanding the Journey(s)
In some ways, creating a map detailing external coverage of the 1906 Germany-UK migration was simple. There were so many UK newspaper articles, UK Home Office files, local and regional police reports, and postcards of the event that sources were not a problem. The scale of the media spectacle meant that almost every day one or more newspapers reported – often using discriminatory and racialised language – on the whereabouts of the 1906 visitors.
Understanding the routes taken turned out to be more difficult. By visually mapping a selection of the newspaper articles in ArcGIS it became clear that there were concurrent ‘mini-journeys’. The resulting ArcGIS StoryMap highlights how groups could be at different locations at the same time. Sometimes these mini-journeys could be isolated and followed, but more often than not they couldn’t.
Creating the Maps
The first stage was to create a basic static map, populated with a chronological spreadsheet of UK newspaper articles. For this, over 300 press reports were manually filtered according to content, with duplicate stories, very short reports, or those not specifically mentioning a geographical location removed. As such, of the several hundred reports, only 73 articles were selected for use in the initial static map to visualise the journey. Here each dot represents a newspaper article that ties the visitors to a specific place on a specific date.
The next step towards the interactive StoryMap was to target specific dates and places and publications, this time informed by the complimentary archival research undertaken. For example, if a police record mentioned activities at a certain place, or a postcard was from a certain town or village, then the corresponding local newspapers on that date were cross referenced. Finally, twenty-two items were selected to form the basis of an interactive, chronological map that could present an overview of the 1906 ‘invasion’ via newspapers, photographs and reports.
A Starting Point
The StoryMap available here is to be viewed only as a starting point. It is a means of visualising a selection of the external coverage of the event via archival and media research. This is presented in order to stimulate further discussions with communities who might question the external narratives and coverage, highlight gaps, contribute stories or community perspectives to follow up on, make new maps, or develop the research themselves in different ways. Whilst it signifies the end of my part of the RomMig mapping work, a German language version will be discussed by the other members of the RomMig team at our community partner hosted workshop in Germany in September. They will report on the next steps. All of the maps I created will be uploaded to this website shortly, alongside a more in depth discussion of the methods and sources to follow in our project publications.
This Summer, Megan Thomas from the University of Liverpool undertook a Masters Research Internship supervised by RomMig Co-I Tamara West and by Katy Hooper from the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. In this invited blog, Megan reflects upon her complex work during the internship, the potential of visual mapping, and on the need for compassionate archival practice.
In April, I began work on the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) Archive in the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections & Archives (SCA) as part of the Masters Research Internship Scheme (MRIS). My small role within the larger interdisciplinary collaboration was designed to build upon understandings of the collection through an exercise in ‘identifying’ missing or separated material. Here, photographs, correspondence, postcards, and newspaper cuttings previously separated from this central record series (to be rearranged in the ‘photograph’ series, for instance) were flagged within the GLS SCA finding aid. This affects the reinscription of meaning and relationships between archival material, subjects, and creators. The meticulous process of combing through Society correspondence from 1926-1966 illuminated the multiple and capacious networks represented across the GLS collections.
Photographs from University of Liverpool Special Collections showing photographs alongside correspondence.
Setting the tone for the duration of the internship, my first day in the archive saw the surprising identification of a photograph, acting as somewhat of a ‘missing piece’, in the visual record of the 1906 Romani migration to the UK from Germany. Here, recently relocated photographic evidence of historical presence offers the exciting potential to ground community narratives in a visible, tangible past. The applicability of this for the RomMig project is immediately striking.
Throughout this internship I was fortunate enough to gain some insight into the amalgamation of archival research, cultural geography, and community outreach in the form of the geospatial storytelling software, Humap. The software seems uniquely appropriate to represent what Humap itself calls ‘imperfect spatial data’. Tracking the physical movements of any group or individual through the archive will be, as a consequence of preservation or interpretation of ‘value’, by nature ‘imperfect’; however, material representations Roma and Sinti migration to the UK in the early 1900s are increasingly dislocated by racist generalisations in the British press and the assumption/appropriation of the cultural authority by academics (‘gypsyologists’). This, in turn, has resulted in multiple and disparate assemblages of archival material across the country relating to Roma and Sinti migration (often remaining out of community control).
Promisingly, Humap makes possible the visual collation of what is known rather than be ensnared by absences. The opportunity to build upon pinned geographical locations and previously ‘unfindable’ photographs with rich, textured narratives is made possible by community collaboration in a software that interactively layers geographical space-time with archival material.
An example of Humap showing the University of Liverpool’s ‘Mapping Memory’ project
Relating to my MA study of Archives and Records Management, the MRIS project engages multiple strands of critical archival theory with its principle objective; ensuring the usability and accessibility of the collection. Compassionate archival practice creates space to negotiate how previously harmful collecting practices can be mitigated in the present to avoid recreating or perpetuating traumatic interactions between the GLS archive and the community it purports to represent. This became a key element of my process when surveying GLS correspondence.
The finding aid used by SCA is helpfully flexible in allowing additional layers of contextualisation and description. When working with particular periods of GLS correspondence, eg. late 1930-40s, it seemed necessary, both in consideration of potential users and recognition of the subjects of the correspondence, to flag the material with Nazi iconography or policy. Similarly, my close reading of the collection series highlighted additional material that requires more compassionate archival care. Flagging photographs of children, as well as, racist language, and sexist/violent descriptions of women demonstrates a recognition and move away from the colonial, ethnographic interpretation of Roma and Sinti lives that were foundational to the practice of GLS “research” and publishing. An awareness of the presence of this material, made visible by sensitivity flags, promotes dialogue between the archive and its users; particularly, in regard to collaborative records-management approaches (eg. repatriation and record closure). Acknowledging potentially traumatic material emphasises the necessity of archival approaches that redress the unequal power-dynamics and colonial mindsets which facilitated the breadth, extent, and intimacy of collated GLS material.
Eve Rosenhaft, Volha Bartash and Mario Franz (from left to right)
On 14 September, Eve Rosenhaft and Volha Bartash, who joins RomMig as our new research team member (Welcome Volha!), travelled to Osnabrück for the Sinti Music Festival organised by our cooperation partner Mario Franz of the Niedersächsischer Landesverband deutscher Sinti. Here is their summary of the event, along with some photos.
The festival takes place in Osnabrück annually and enjoys increasing popularity with the local public. Among visitors were friends of the Landesverband, admirers of jazz music and community members including families and young people.
Students of music from Hildesheim with their teachers, Kaja and Tchavolo Vladak from Prague
According to Mario Franz, the Musik Festival seeks to demonstrate a rich cultural tradition of German Sinti. For many, playing music continues to be a family tradition. The agenda of this year´s event was the connection between generations, with a focus on the young. Not coincidentally, the program started with the performance of young guitarists from Hildesheim, for some of whom it was their first performance on stage.
Without doubt, one of the event´s highlights was the band Winterstein Sintett that performs in a mix of styles, such as swing, jazz, french “Chansons” and traditional songs in Romanes, the language of German Sinti.
But the focus here was not only on youth, but on the wide variety of music they make. Besides locally known Sinti jazz bands, the programme included Maio, a pioneer of Sinti rap whose texts refer to daily experiences of anti-Gypsyism and the memories of persecution under National Socialism. A memorial plague from 1995 (behind the Festival scene, see image on left) commemorates 55 Sinti from Osnabrück that were killed in Nazi camps.
“Through the compelling lens of horse markets in early twentieth-century Berlin, this article provides a masterful analysis of the production of urban space. The research ranges across archival evidence and media representations to trace community interactions and networks. While critically noting the challenges of working on such materials, Rosenhaft commits to innovative handling in the use of mapping to visualize the data. A highly nuanced argument is constructed around varied images and lived experiences of interactions across and beyond the Roma communities, and it is finally situated in the idea of Berlin as ‘a space of fractured and layered remembering’. Having skilfully unpicked this rich historical material to cast light on urban spatial concepts, Rosenhaft poignantly draws attention to how such histories have been overshadowed by subsequent memorializations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
