RomMig

One of the key themes of the RomMig project is the practices by which Sinti and Roma were policed in Germany and Britain and across Europe. European states and societies shared the project of monitoring, controlling and – in the long term – suppressing their mobility and their ways of living and working, a project which geared up in the decades studied by RomMig. 

Nearly all public agencies and social institutions took part in this project, and the police and the courts played key roles, maintaining a machinery of criminalisation and discrimination that operated without interruption even by the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and persists today. This means that combating antigypsyism today calls for engagement with the police, judicial and other authorities to remind them of the history they share with Sinti and Roma and give them the tools to recognise and counter racism in their own everyday work. 

Our partner Mario Franz, of the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, is doing pioneering work in this field. He is consulting with police chiefs from across the region to establish anti-gypsyism awareness courses for new recruits to the police service, and in cooperation with the Leibniz University he is working to extend the training programme to staff in other agencies such as job centres and youth services.

Significantly, the most recent venue for the Association’s exhibition on the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma in Lower Saxony was the courthouse in Göttingen, where it was opened by the Göttingen Chief of Police and a senior judge of the district court.

RomMig held its first workshop at the University of Bielefeld on 6-7 March, under the title Transnational Migration in Romani History: Agency, Media, and Policing. In spite of the snowy weather, we were able to carry on our discussions in comfort with the friendly and expert support of Bielefeld’s state-of-the-art Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.

Speakers from the UK and Continental Europe discussed individual cases in Romani history and questions of sources, archives and interpretation from a range of disciplinary perspectives, with a particular focus on Romani experiences of migration and border-crossing. RomMig members Felix Brahm, Mario Franz, Eve Rosenhaft and Tamara West introduced the RomMig project, including aspects of research cooperation between scholars and the Romani community. 

Jodie Matthews (Huddersfield) opened the speaker sessions with the question ‘How do disciplinary borders impact figurations of the transnational?’ and with wide-ranging reflections on the potential uses of literary works and visual representations – sometimes read against the grain – as sources. Anglo-Romany scholar and poet Karen Barton offered examples of the ways in which Romani poets have negotiated questions of identity in the face of ‘legacies of bordered imaginations’, increasingly in dialogue with other diasporic and colonised people. Literary texts were also the theme of the presentation by Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Bielefeld) at the close of the workshop, in which he analysed the themes of migration, victimhood and resistance in Matéo Maximoff’s semi-autobiographical novel Verdammt zu Leben (French original: Condamné à survivre, 1984). 

Between these literary book-ends, presentations by historians addressed specific moments in Romani migration history, all on the basis of new in-depth research and all with an emphasis on the active agency and family strategies of Romani actors. With a paper on European ports as springboards for Romani mobility (1870-1920), Adèle Sutre (Paris) offered a glimpse into her rich research findings on the transoceanic migrations of Romani families in the ‘age of mass migration’. Simon Constantine (Wolverhampton) discussed the context of the movements of German Sinti and Roma which are at the centre of the RomMig project, detailing the intensified police harassment around 1900 that was a ‘push-factor’ for them; Romani resistance to the forced removal of Romani children from their families is a still under-researched dimension of the package of family strategies that included emigration. The impacts of state harassment and attempts at forced sedentarisation were also Colin Clark’s (Glasgow) theme, in his presentation on Scotland’s long-running ‘Tinker Experiment’ (1917-1989). Verena Meier (Heidelberg) gave an account of the situation of Central German Sinti families in the immediate post-war period, seeking to reunite scattered families under conditions of continuing public and official prejudice, the tightening of the German-German border and the forced expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. Also focusing on the aftermath of the Holocaust, Volha Bartash (Regensburg) discussed her use of memoirs, diaries and visual material (in the absence of archival sources) to study the personal, familial and community dimensions of migration by Polska Roma. 

We are looking forward to preparing the workshop papers for open-access publication.

Meanwhile, the next RomMig conference will be held at the German Historical Institute, London, 24-26 April 2024. The title of the conference is Crossings: Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires (c. 1850-1914), and the Call for Papers is here.

 

Crossings: Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires (c. 1850-1914). 

Conference to be held at the German Historical Institute London, April 25-26, 2024

The time period between 1850 and 1914 is often referred to as the age of mass migration, with more than 30 million Europeans immigrating to the United States alone. However, as previous scholarship has shown, this was by no means an age of free movement. While overseas shipping routes expanded and prices in passenger transport fell, the period also saw increasing state interventions and the establishing of migration regimes that distinguished between “desirable” and “undesirable” immigrant groups. Although non-elite in social composition, the mass migration of the time was overwhelmingly a privileged “white” migration in the age of global empires. 

This is clear when we focus on groups whose transnational mobility was restricted or who were threatened with deportation. But neither state intervention nor societal hostility completely prevented groups labelled as “undesirable” from migrating – in flight from persecution and conflict or in search of opportunities to live and earn in another country. While adopting strategies of survival in the host countries, these groups of “undesired” immigrants often faced huge public responses, followed by new legislation and deportations, resulting in subsequent odysseys. This can be seen, for example, in colonial migration to Europe or in the Romani migration to the UK. Other groups remained under the radar, or only came into focus later, such as the Cape Verdean immigrants to the US. 

This conference brings together research on non-privileged migration from the 1850s to the First World War. We invite contributions that explore transnational mobility and its restriction, emerging migration, citizenship and border regimes, economic strategies in “hostile environments” and the reconstruction, visualisation and memorialisation of migrants’ itineraries and experiences, including digital methods. We are especially interested in perspectives that combine (trans-)local with global and imperial perspectives. Contributions from all relevant disciplines are welcome. 

Key questions include: 

– How does a focus on non-privileged groups sharpen our understanding of transnational mobility and migration regimes in the age of global empires? Who became “undesirable” migrants, and what categories of social difference and their intersection took effect? 

– What state interventions and policing practices were adopted? How did these differ between countries and empires, and what levels of international or transimperial cooperation were established? How did metropolitan and imperial migration regimes inform each other? 

– What role did the media play in public responses to migration, and in how far were migrants and supporting groups able to use the media in their behalf? 

– How did groups of migrants circumvent mobility restrictions, and what economic strategies did they adopt in the host countries, or post deportation? What was the role of private migration agents? 

– With what methods can we reconstruct, make visible, and memorialise migrants’ itineraries and experiences? 

The conference will be held at the German Historical Institute London (GHIL). It is co-financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the GHIL. We anticipate being able to reimburse standard travel expenses and the cost of accommodation for the duration of the conference. Papers from scholars at any stage of their career, drawing on developments in any world areas in the period roughly between 1850 and 1914 are invited. Abstracts of about 300 words and a short CV should be sent both to Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft (felix.brahm@uni-muenster.de, dan85@liverpool.ac.uk) by 15.11.2023. 

GHIL admin contact: Julian Triandafyllou (j.triandafyllou@ghil.ac.uk)

Eve Rosenhaft discusses emerging research on performances staged by Romani visitors to Britain at the turn of the 20th Century

“…sang English songs and danced the cakewalk…” This verbal snapshot of Romani girls and boys dancing the cakewalk on the pier gave us a startling insight into the experience of the travellers. At the same time it opened up a whole new line of inquiry into aspects of their journey and even into wider questions of Romani musical performance around the turn of the century. The cakewalk doesn’t figure in any account of European Romani performances that we have seen. Where, we wondered, did they learn it, and how unusual was its appearance in the Hamburg docks?

Like so many modern popular dances, the cakewalk originated with African Americans. It began as a social dance that involved exaggerated high-stepping, often danced by men and women in evening clothes, probably devised by enslaved Black people to parody the behaviour of the white planters. By the 20^th century it was also a model for elaborate individual performances   on the dance floor and in the context of show-dances. Around the turn of the century, the cakewalk became popular all over the world, entering the repertoire of dance bands and cabaret combos and even featuring in the classical compositions of Claude Debussy  As Astrid Kusser explains in her book Körper im Schieflage (2013), the cakewalk had arrived in Germany by the time our Romani migrants left for Britain, featuring regularly as a social dance in urban dance halls from 1905. 

How did the cakewalk enter the repertoire of Romani Germans? 

Romani musicians who played for non-Romani audiences always depended for their livelihoods on knowing what their audiences wanted, and this meant picking up on the latest trends in popular music, learning new tunes by ear and playing them back – though often in a characteristic style that added a touch of the exotic to the performance. A rare first-hand account of Romani musicians in Germany from the early 1900s confirms that even when travelling in the countryside and playing in wayside inns, ‘[t]hey play by ear and by heart whatever they think will best please their audience … low music-hall crazes [and] Gassenhauer [popular songs]’ (Bernard Gilliat-Smith, ‘The Gypsies of the Rhine Provinz in 1902-03’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society NS 1 (1907-08): 125-44: 129).

Another dimension of their story that is beginning to emerge is the evidence that, once in Britain, they worked together with English and Scottish promoters who organised venues, advertised their performances and shared the takings. We want to know more about those promoters, some of whom seem to have specialised in sponsoring Romani groups. At this stage we can hypothesise that they would have advised the performers on what songs and dances would sell, and also that through them the Romani visitors might have had the opportunity to share the stage with and learn from non-Romani musicians and dancers. 

Wherever and however it originated, the Romani cakewalk is an object lesson in the adaptability, enterprise and essential modernity of European Roma.