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.
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!