This article explores the Romani contribution to the construction of urban space(s), focusing on the city of Berlin between about 1890 and 1933, with a particular emphasis on the period between the ...turn of the century and the First World War. Drawing on press reports, it offers evidence for public awareness of a new Romani presence in and around the city, and proposes that media representations of ‘Gypsies’ in the new suburbs reflected the heightened sensitivity to setting boundaries between urban and rural, civilized and uncivilized, that informed Berlin's ‘urban imaginary’ at a time of expansion and modernization. In a second step, the agency of Romani Berliners in defining the city as a multi-ethnic metropolis and shaping spaces within it is considered. The account focuses on productive interactions between Romani and non-Romani actors in the horse markets which drew Sinti and Roma to settle in Berlin and on the lives of horse-dealing families in the city at large, including the tendential emergence of ‘Gypsy’ neighbourhoods.
This book, designed as a resource for scholars, educators, activists and non-specialist readers, presents the results of new research on the role of Romani groups in European culture and society ...since the nineteenth century. Its specific focus is on the ways in which Romani actors, in their interactions with non-Romanies, have contributed to shaping Europe’s public spaces. Twelve chapters recount the experiences and accomplishments of individuals and families, from across Europe (England, France, Spain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Finland) and Canada. All based on new research, and maintaining a focus on the real lives and activities of Romani people rather than on the perspective of the majority societies, these studies exemplify the creative presence of Romani people in the fields of politics, economics and culture. We see them as writers, artists and performers, political activists and resistance fighters, traders and entrepreneurs, circus and cinema managers and purveyors of popular science. Sensitive to the ambivalent position from which Roma act, the cases are linked and contextualized by a general introduction and by section introductions written by leading scholars of Romani studies with expertise in history, ethnography, musicology, literary and discourse studies and visual culture. The volume is richly illustrated, including many images that have never been published before, and includes an extensive bibliography / guide to further reading. Contributors to the volume: Begoña Barrera, Beatriz Carrillo de los Reyes, Malte Gasche, Paweł Lechowski, Anna G. Piotrowska, Laurence Prempain, Juan Pro, Eve Rosenhaft, Carolina García Sanz, María Sierra, and Tamara West.
Black Germany Aitken, Robbie; Rosenhaft, Eve
09/2013
eBook
This groundbreaking history traces the development of Germany's black community, from its origins in colonial Africa to its decimation by the Nazis during World War II. Robbie Aitken and Eve ...Rosenhaft follow the careers of Africans arriving from the colonies, examining why and where they settled, their working lives and their political activities, and giving unprecedented attention to gender, sexuality and the challenges of 'mixed marriage'. Addressing the networks through which individuals constituted community, Aitken and Rosenhaft explore the ways in which these relationships spread beyond ties of kinship and birthplace to constitute communities as 'black'. The study also follows a number of its protagonists to France and back to Africa, providing new insights into the roots of Francophone black consciousness and postcolonial memory. Including an in-depth account of the impact of Nazism and its aftermath, this book offers a fresh critical perspective on narratives of 'race' in German history.
This article reflects on two exhibitions, in 2018 and 2019, about the Nazi persecution of German Sinti and Roma. One was produced by an Anglo-German curatorial team and toured Britain and ...Continental Europe. The second was designed by South Korean curators and installed temporarily in a gallery in downtown Seoul. The two exhibitions drew on the same photographic archive, narrated the persecution histories of Romani subjects of the photographs, and used the story of their relationship with the non-Romani photographer to ask questions about responsibility and to prompt visitors to reflect on their own status as “implicated subjects” in contemporary forms of discrimination. Given different expectations of the level of knowledge that visitors bring to the exhibition and different communicative tools familiar to them (the Seoul curators included creative artists), the two curatorial teams took very different approaches to informing and moving their audiences – and to meeting the recognized challenges of representing Romani history and identity – not least in the ways in which the exhibition’s message was mediated in face-to-face conversations on site. The aesthetic approach adopted in Seoul did not fully succeed in maintaining the balance between explanation and exoticization. The evaluation relies on visitor surveys (quantitative and qualitative) and interviews with guides.
This open access book provides a concise introduction to a critical development in memory studies. A global memory formation has emerged since the 1990s, in which memories of traumatic histories in ...different parts of the world, often articulated in the terms established by Holocaust memory, have become entangled, reconciled, contested, conflicted and negotiated across borders. As historical actors and events across time and space become connected in new ways, new grounds for contest and competition arise; claims to the past that appeared de-territorialized in the global memory formation become re-territorialized – deployed in the service of nationalist projects. This poses challenges to scholarship but also to practice: How can we ensure that shared or comparable memories of past injustice continue to be grounds for solidarity between different memory communities? In chapters focusing on Europe, East Asia and Africa, five scholars respond to these challenges from a range of disciplinary perspectives in the humanities.
Romani victims of Nazi persecution and German expellees developed as distinct memory communities after 1945, but the pre-war integration of Sinti and gadje in East Prussia has left traces in their ...memory texts. Non-Romani texts and photos contain rare evidence for aspects of Sinti life before the genocide, much of it now available (only) on the internet. Conversely, Sinti were among the Germans who were forced to leave East Prussia after 1944, and awareness of dual trauma and nostalgia for the Heimat they shared with other Germans is apparent in their memory texts. The article explores these points of contact between the two memory communities and their implications for more solidary forms of remembering and re-visioning the region's multiethnic past.
Civilians and War in Europe 1618–1815 examines the relationship between civilians and warfare from the start of the Thirty Years War to the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The volume ...interrogates received narratives of warfare that identify the development of modern 'total' war with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and instead considers the continuities and transformations in warfare over the course of two hundred years. The contributors examine prisoners of war, the cultures of plunder, the tensions of billeting, and war-time atrocities throughout England, France, Spain, and the German territories. They also explore the legal practices surrounding the conduct and aftermath of war; representations of civilians, soldiers, and militias; and the philosophical underpinnings of warfare. They probe what it meant to be a civilian in territories beset by invasion and civil war or in times when ‘peace’ at home was accompanied by almost continuous military engagement abroad. Their accounts show us civilians not only as anguished sufferers, but also directly involved with war: fighting back with shocking violence, profiting from war-time needs, and negotiating for material and social redress. And they show us individuals and societies coming to terms with the moral and political challenges posed by the business of drawing lines between ‘civilians’ and ‘soldiers’.
With contributors drawn from the fields of political and legal theory, literature and the visual arts, and military, political, social, and cultural history, this volume will appeal to all those with an interest in the history of warfare and the evolution of the idea of the civilian.
Black German Michael, Theodor; Rosenhaft, Eve
2017., 2017-03-13
eBook
This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is among the few ...surviving members of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. Theodor Michael's life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in Black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator’s preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.
In the growing scholarship on marginalia, relatively little attention has been given to their function in military memoirs. This article proposes that modern military marginalia have a quality of ...their own, if we accept Yuval Noah Harari's diagnosis of a 'modern war culture' emerging from the concurrent developments of an expanding book market and a post-Enlightenment epistemology that attributes special significance to the experience and remembrance of war. In the light of this ambivalent quality of modernity, the military annotator can be seen as a 'guerrilla memoirist', re-appropriating the intimate conversation among combatants in tacit challenge to the commodification and marketization of their shared experience. The article draws on historical examples of military marginalia and on Lewis Hyde's account of the gift relationship to contextualize a case study: the annotations (including a pasted-in trench map) made by an American First World War veteran in a copy of Storm of Steel, the 1929 American edition of Ernst Jünger's best-selling war memoir In Stahlgewittern.
