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.
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.
