The Liverpool mapping workshop was held at the University of Liverpool on 7 October. The participants included representatives of local government, Friends, Families and Travellers (the national organisation of British Gypsies, Roma and Travellers), archivists and academics from Liverpool and Leeds universities, and members of Liverpool’s Roma community.
As in Ahlem, the event offered an opportunity for reflection on the historical context of the story and the role played by digital innovation, and also for cross-community dialogue. We shared ideas about how mapping and storytelling can help recover marginalised histories and challenge contemporary forms of anti-Romani discrimination.
Even though the ethical issues we discussed in Ahlem had a different valence with a British audience, the local setting meant that they were very present in our minds: Liverpool was the seat of the Gypsy Lore Society, and the Special Collections of the Liverpool University Library include the Society’s archives and related Romani collections – on which the RomMig project has drawn extensively. The workshop conversations drew us back to the insight that taken at face value, those sources overwhelmingly reflect the pervasive racism of the majority society. They can be read as just another depressing record of discrimination and harassment, and so we need to be alert to our own purposes and also to the needs of our audiences when we use them. This is precisely the area where cross-community dialogue is critical.
Colleagues from the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti joined the workshop via Zoom, and reported back from the Ahlem workshop. Here the themes of ethical responsibility and cooperative research that emerged there were again emphasised. These points were also able underlined with reference to a recent development: In September, the German Federal Archives signed an agreement with the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma governing the use of the files on Romani individuals and families created by the Racial Hygiene Research Unit during the Nazi regime.
Under the title Old Routes – New Insights the first of two RomMig workshops took place in Germany on 7 September.
Members of the Münster and Liverpool teams were hosted by our partners, the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, in the Ahlem Memorial Site. Originally a Jewish school of horticulture which became a ghetto and assembly point for the deportation of Jews from Hannover, the site is also adjacent to a railway station from which Sinti and Roma were deported to Auschwitz in 1943.
The workshop was attended by members of the Association and by local educators and museum curators. The German version of the StoryMap was presented and set against the background of the wider RomMig project. The map was discussed as a starting point – a tool for highlighting gaps and stimulating new conversations about local history, memory and cultural heritage.
Questions were framed by an intensive and wide-ranging conversation about the ethical dimensions of historical research in this field. The history of discrimination, surveillance and active persecution suffered by people racialised as ‘Gypsies’ – culminating in the near destruction of Germany’s Sinti and Roma communities under the Nazis – makes the culturally sensitive and ethically responsible handling of historical and contemporary data particularly urgent. Discussions made clear that this sensitivity should extend to acknowledging the differences between the historical experiences of different groups and also that their respective understandings of integrity, ethics and sensitivity can differ. At the same time, traumatic histories can make communities hesitant to share the linguistic and cultural knowledge that is key to understanding them as historical actors. In Ahlem, Sinti, Roma and ‘Gadze’ were able to interrogate together the specific ways in which we had handled and presented visual and textual material, including biographical data. It became clear that the trust, transparency and participation that are required for conversations like ours to bear fruit are not given, but rather the results of a long-term cooperative process.
Particularly when dealing with archives, sources and data collections that often originate from contexts of violence, coercion or dehumanisation – whether they are nineteenth-century police records or the pseudo-scientific surveys conducted by the Racial Hygiene Research Unit during the Nazi regime – it is clear that the conditions under which knowledge was created cannot be separated from the responsibility for its use today. The relationship between communities and research institutions therefore remains a sensitive area in which trust can only grow through consistent openness, co-determination and the recognition of community expertise.
The need for work on issues of data sovereignty, access rights and institutional responsibility remains central. Who controls the archives? Who has access to the sources and the data obtained from them? Who is responsible for the stories that are told, the images that are shown and the effects they have on Roma, Sinti and the majority society audience? The real benefit of the project lies in addressing these questions: a deeper awareness that cooperative research itself is part of a cultural negotiation process – and that it can only endure if it does not presuppose trust, but rather develops it through shared practice. We agreed to look for new funding and platforms to continue our conversations.
The Hannover Town Hall Event
Mario Franz: the analytical concept of Z-Projection
The RomMig workshop was part of a weekend of events which also included a symposium on the concept of Z-Projection. Developed by Mario Franz, it offers an alternative to ‘antigypsyism’ as a tool for analysing historical and contemporary forms of racism – a link to Mario’s work is provided below.
The symposium took place in the historic New Town Hall in Hannover. The discussion included contributions from academics and policy makers. Both the Ahlem workshop and the symposium were organised by Ricardo Tietz, and RomMig funding was supplemented by grants from the NGOs Wir 2.0 and DemokratieLeben!
In November 2024, Josephine Lena Winterwerb, a Master’s student from the University of Münster, joined the RomMig Project as a student assistant, working with archival materials from the Polish State Archives. In this invited blogpost, she shares insights from her work with these documents. Josie also draws a comparison with her own Bachelor’s thesis on bureaucratic discrimination in the German Kaiserreich, reflecting on key differences in archival material, methodology, and the forms of violence documented.
I joined the German RomMig Team as a student assistant working closely with Felix Brahm and Volha Bartash. Volha’s extensive research in the regional branches of the Polish State Archives in Koszalin, Szczecin and Poznań provided hundreds of scans of archival files. These files mainly contain governmental decrees and lists of Sinti and Roma persons, produced by the police. The latter include their biographical information, descriptions of physical attributes, validity and status of their documents and occasionally details about the group they were accompanied by.
I started work on the archival files by reviewing every document and recording all mentions of Sinti or Roma persons. So far, the list of names runs to 76 pages. Alongside this, I worked with a previously researched list of individuals that possibly made the 1906 journey to Britain and are thus of relevance to the project. For these people, I have recorded all available information from the documents. From the archival material and comparison with the previously researched list, I have been able to identify 13 new locations connected to the persons who potentially undertook the journey to Britain and back. These span a time period from 1899 to 1914.
Image: State Archive Koszalin, 26/19/0/2.30/4336, Polizeiliche Massregeln gegen Zigeunerfamilien. Generalia. Vol. I, 1844-1908, p.1.
By working with the Polish archival material, we can add valuable details to the map, discover new information about individuals, and trace networks and ties between groups. This ultimately further enriches our understanding of Romani migration between Britain and Germany from the 1880s to 1914.
The work I have had the opportunity to undertake for the RomMig Project aligns closely with my personal interests as well as the research for my Bachelor’s degree. Alongside my position as a student assistant, I completed my Bachelor’s thesis this year titled “Agency in the face of bureaucratic power: Appeals against the denial of itinerant trade licenses in the province of Westphalia between 1912 and 1914 and the discrimination against Sinti* and Roma* in the German Kaiserreich”.
For the thesis, I conducted my own archival research at the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster and chose four case studies on which to focus. These consisted of appeals submitted by itinerant businesspeople to high-ranking administrative bodies in the province of Westphalia, as well as the internal communication between different government departments and their responses to the appellants.
When comparing the archival research for my Bachelor’s thesis with my work for RomMig, I noticed several significant differences and have gained valuable new insights. My Bachelor’s research followed a qualitative and detailed approach whereas the work with the Polish archives relies more on quantitative methods, complemented by only a few specific case studies. Another distinction lies in the content of the documents and the type of analysis they allow. For my Bachelor’s thesis, I examined the mechanisms of state administration and the non-physical violence that bureaucratic processes exert. The Polish archival files, however, often contained less abstract and more direct, interpersonal forms of violence, for example mentions of relentless police supervision or forced displacement and deportation. This closer examination of police files has allowed me to gain deeper insights into the police persecution of Sinti and Romani people.
The body of documents I analysed for my thesis consisted mainly of personal appeals written by Sinti and Roma individuals alongside documents created by state authorities. The Polish archival files, on the other hand, almost exclusively reflect the perspective of the state. This contrast gave me the opportunity to further investigate the mechanisms of administrative bodies in the Kaiserreich and their role in the discrimination against Sinti and Romani people. This led me to further reflect on how to approach the bias of such archival material.
Being involved with RomMig and engaging with the associated archival materials has made me especially curious about several important points. I am particularly interested in how the project can rework insights from racist archival materials into a meaningful outcome that supports understanding of Sinti and Roma history while being respectful of and accountable to the community. I am intrigued by how the broader picture the archival research data creates can be interwoven with the personal stories which emerge. Perhaps most exciting for me is the emphasis on community involvement – I am looking forward to future collaboration and opportunities for open dialogue.
We are pleased to announce the publication of Eve Rosenhaft´s chapter in the recently released volume The Routledge Handbook of Information History (edited by Toni Weller, Alistair Black, Bonnie Mak & Laura Skouvig / Routledge 2026).
The chapter “Information and Mobility: Migrants and Roma as Historical Cases” (pp. 442-456), explores how information and movement intersect in European history. Eve begins by framing information as “knowledge in motion” and shows how, from the eighteenth century on, migrants’ decisions to move — where to go, how to reach it, how to settle — were deeply shaped by the information networks they accessed and created. The second half of the chapter shifts focus to Roma communities, whose mobility challenges conventional notions of migration. Rosenhaft demonstrates how Roma travellers employed informal communication systems (for example, landscape markers) and adopted technologies like telephones and postal networks — even as they were subject to state surveillance, classification and persecution. This chapter offers fresh insight into how mobility and information practices are intertwined — and how mobility may at once be enabled and constrained by the circulation of information.
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.
