Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  I won’t exclude the possibility that some police are racist. Given the heated discussion about asylum, everyone is surely thinking about all these foreigners who are arriving. It was not smart or reasonable to send them here [to the Eastern states] so soon. Police are not against every foreigner, but only certain ones, like the Sinti and Roma and black Africans.

  Foreigners—the more foreign the better—certainly had their uses. The writer Günter Grass also singled out Gypsies among Germany’s broad selection of foreigners. In a lecture entitled “Losses,” given in November of 1992 (five days after three long-resident Turkish women were burned in their beds at Mölln), he suggested that “half a million and more Sinti and Roma” come live in Germany: “We need them.” Both the riot-pressed authorities and Günter Grass were deploying “Sinti and Roma” as a symbol of the stranger. Whether hostile or humanizing, the Gypsies above all were other. In the spring of 1993 the German federal parliament voted to amend Article 16. The message was clear. Days later, at Solingen, a town near Cologne, two Turkish women and three Turkish girls were murdered.

  In Oberwart, Austria, four Roma were killed by a pipe bomb in February 1995. The bomb went off when the men tried to remove a sign that read “Gypsies Go Back to India.” Oberwart is in Austria’s Burgenland, where Roma have been settled for more than three hundred years. (photo credits 6.1)

  I was in Germany that week. On the walk to the castle from Machern Station you pass wooded glens and enchanted, bramble-buried cottages with low, child-size doorways. It is easy to imagine that the people of this Grimm-like hamlet slept through forty years of communism. Machern, near Leipzig, was an improbable setting for one of the earliest post-unification skinhead rallies. Since then it has been host to what locals see as a never-ending troop of asylum-seekers, though they are housed outside town. (Some three hundred would-be refugees, all of them Roma, were living at Sachsen, a nearby camp.) For a few June days in 1993, Machern also played host to a small group of concerned Germans and Romanian Gypsies who had gathered in the local Schloss, or castle, to explore any possible benefits from the migration of Roma in particular. Because they were still filing into Germany in their thousands, while everything conspired to thwart their migration.

  I needed no visa to travel to Machern. Participants from the EC were free to come and go. But some of the invited Gypsies were detained by immigration officials and missed all or part of the conference. One of them was a Member of Parliament. What chance, then, did the rest of them stand? These people might be cast out, but they certainly weren’t downcast.

  One participating refugee expert, whose job it had been to prepare deported Mozambiquans for a difficult re-entry to their country, coached conferees in the “skills” he’d pass on to the disappointed before they were herded onto that homebound plane. On the conference center’s visual-aid display board he scribbled:

  Bescheiden Sein!

  Vertrauen Haben!

  Fehlschlage Einkalkulieren!

  Be modest; have trust; calculate risks. Bescheidenheit: modesty. That is the free advice the nearly departed get for their trouble. A Hungarian specialist involved in job creation for Roma outlined various “development strategies” and “survival strategies,” including, in the latter category, collecting bottles for deposits.

  At the final session, which everyone was expected to attend, only three Roma remained: two businessmen seeking investors, and Nicolae Gheorghe, the ubiquitous activist. Where had the other three Rom leaders gone? Where was Gheorghe Raducanu, the only Gypsy MP in Romania? And where was Vasile Burtea, the well-spoken representative of the Romanian Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and, according to his business card, “Sociolist [sic] and Economist”? Where was the blue-haired Nicolae Bobu, Diplomat in drept; avocat (“degreed in law; lawyer”), president of the General Union of Roma in Romania, and “ex Parlamentar” (as his card boasted)?

  While the working groups presented their “findings,” the conference organizers looked exasperatedly across the panel to the three empty seats in the front row. These Germans, genuinely interested in seeking workable solutions for Gypsy migrants, were talking among themselves. And then, though I wasn’t really looking, I found them.

  Stepping out into the eastern German drizzle for some air, from the top of the grandly scalloped steps of the Schloss I surveyed the blue puddles dotted over the newly tarmacked parking lot. There they were, the mischievous crème of Romanian Gypsies, squealing with delight around a pair of toylike two-door cars—the twin Trabants that they had just picked up for 75 and 150 deutschemarks, or 45 and 90 bucks respectively. The three men looked like boys, all of them small in their even smaller suits, poking around under the hoods of their new wheels like boy teenagers anywhere. They were jubilant—after all, this is what most Gypsy migrants were coming to Germany for: to buy cars for resale in the East, at no cost to the German social or welfare system.

  I asked the MP how they knew where to buy cars, on such short notice, with little German and a great deal of rain. He shrugged and laughed. Stupid question. No, these were not people who needed to be schooled in survival strategies.

  Gypsies like the Machern delegates had been working this route several hundred years before ethnic nationalism was even articulated in Germany; half a millennium ago, many others had made their home in German lands. But still Sinti in Germany do not qualify for Volksgruppe status, as do other minority groups, such as the Danes and the Sorbs. So when does a foreigner become a native? The American Constitution originally defined the descendants of African slaves as three-fifths human; and now “native” is still wrongly used in the United States to denote an Indian, rather than merely someone who has claims of birth. The Sinti would never be regarded as natives (except in the sense of “primitives”), let alone as Germans. But could their hosts, who share borders with eight different countries, really entertain the existence of a pure Teuton outside some Frankenstein’s laboratory? Of course not. It is the idea of the pure-blooded German that is the kernel of German identity, and by extension the cultural values which are deemed to be racially ensured. The Romanian Gypsies would be familiar with this line of thinking, after years of Ceausescu’s rhetoric about the Dacians, the “pure” proto-Romanians. All citizens of the former Eastern bloc shared—or, if they were minorities, suffered from—this dream of a one-race state; Germany was the model.

  At work in the German imagining of itself is the sentimental ideal of the Volk. Originally a reaction against the French glorification of the individual, the Volk myth provided a unifying ideology for a population which was widely dispersed, particularly over the eastern territories. The German Romantic intelligentsia, probably sitting around these very Schlosses at the beginning of the nineteenth century, came up with the notion of the Volk—epitomized by the archetypal German still found on packaging everywhere: blond, healthy, neat, and busy. To look at any Heidi on a packet of German biscuits is to understand the ideal: inner well-being—as revealed by pink cheeks and lustrous yellow hair—achieved by happy and industrious allegiance (or submission) to the Volk.

  This Volk business provides clues to the special contempt that Gypsies, among many despised foreigners, seem to elicit. First, they appear to be the German Volk’s opposite: dirty, dark, devious, idle, and aggressively antisocial. But then, more subtly, these people really do represent a Volk. They keep to themselves and they maintain their customs, their language, and their close-knit community, itself always prized above the individual. At least among their own, Gypsies were truly communitarian in a way that Germans could only fantasize about. The Germans offered citizenship to “ethnic” Germans abroad as a reward for supposedly having refused to adopt heathen (Slavic) ways over their centuries-long sojourn in the East; and here, right in their front yards, was a group who really had not—and would not—assimilate.

  In the fall of 1992, and again in 1993, I traveled in the new eastern Länder, or states, to see how the recent arrivals were fitting in. Posses of Gypsy wo
men—you never see a lone Gypsy—are a common spectacle. Mostly, to guess by their garments, they were of the Kalderash tribe, from Romania. In their bright, reddish, dizzy-patterned yards of skirt, with babies slung in little hammocks over the hip, they appear in an eastern German street like the only color figures in a black-and-white photograph.

  A pack of Gypsy women and their children were hovering about the door of the public prosecutor’s office in Cottbus, a leafy east German town not far from Berlin and close to the Polish border. According to the guard, they’d been waiting for days for an appointment with anyone and the chance to obtain the release of some of their imprisoned menfolk on the grounds that they were sick of Germany and wanted to—promised to—go away. At the end of the day, still sprawled over the wide front steps of the building, they didn’t look like they were going anywhere fast. It seemed brave enough to be hanging around that office at all, given their precarious legal status, but it was easy to imagine how their languid, nothing-to-lose poses and the anti-camouflage clothes might strike east Germans as provocative. They didn’t speak to anyone and they weren’t doing anything, but still their appearance would be read as aggressive. Whatever they did, and despite a long-settled, well-integrated population of about seventy thousand German Gypsies, by appearance alone these recent arrivals have become emblematic of the unassimilable foreigner.

  Ready for new opportunities: Ion Mihai, a Kalderash Rom from Sintesti, Romania, combines his role of bulibasha — traditional local leader and settler of disputs — with a succesfull carrer as a scrap-metal dealer, 1993. (photo credits 6.2)

  In contrast to the locals, when they did bestir themselves they moved on with a lightness and skirt-swirling swiftness that made you wonder if what you’d just seen wasn’t a handful of confetti flung over the gray cityscape. But something else gave them the air of an apparition, and an anachronism: like the standard-issue Edwardian ghosts of films, they were in period costume. Their men—whom one hardly saw, even though they are traditionally charged with dealings among gadje—had kept their mustaches but exchanged their traditional togs for the cheap suits and dumpster-wear of poor people the world over. Yet the women could have been actresses in a film about earlier migrations, playing the “ethnic” counterparts to the new arrivals in frockcoats and top hats at Ellis Island in the crowd scene of Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant. The women sport the same sweeping skirts and back-knotted flowery head scarves that say and always have said: Gypsy.

  Wild, untamable, and sexy, Carmen, the original coal-eyed fatale, was in her creator Prosper Mérimée’s description, “a thoroughbred filly from a Cordova stud.” Being a Gypsy, she was also a talented thief. And a murderess. Thus prejudice is complicated by romantic yearnings, which find a sad echo among the Gypsies themselves, always anxious to tell you that they—not the sorners down the road—are the real Gypsies. Even the castanet-clacking stereotype is cast as a lesson in danger, and it seems she may be activated at any time, even among the lot of disheveled women behind chicken wire in a German refugee camp. The Gypsy is the quintessential stranger—and strangers are never benevolent.

  It starts early, with fear. “Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret yet / The Black tinkler winna get ye,” goes a not very soothing Scottish lullaby. In traditional Bulgarian carnivals—still a feature of peasant life in remote parts of what was once called Thrace—the Plague is represented as an old Gypsy woman; or, more ominously, as a heavy cart pulled along by harnessed Gypsies.

  The spy, though, is perhaps the oldest among sinister stereotypes. With their foreign tongue, dark looks, and ambiguous origins; with their expert knowledge of local laws and hedgerows and their tendency to hug the borders; with their disinclination to comply with local custom and their lack of apparent allegiance to anyone—Gypsies were particularly vulnerable to the charge. With no state of their own, and without even the desire for one—a condition both unique and unfathomable, then as now—they had to be in the service of some foreign country or sovereign.

  The Germans, with their empire at the edge of the Christian world, were especially drawn to the espionage theory, which first crops up in the 1424 diary of one Ratisbon, a Bavarian priest. The earliest imperial edicts anywhere against the Gypsies, issued by Maximilian I in 1497, 1498, and 1500, single them out as spies in the pay of the Turks.

  But nowadays they are called fakers of another kind: Scheinasylanten—literally, fake-asylum-seekers, or, in the political euphemism, “economic” refugees. All migrants move in pursuit of a better life; furthermore, those who uproot themselves are often the most enterprising members of their society (the economic refugee is the hero of the American dream). Still, these Gypsies were not merely ambitious, for “economic” refugees often become so as a result of discriminatory politics. One way was through targeted deportation strategies. But more generally, as Gypsies, they are the least likely to be hired, housed, or schooled anywhere in the former Eastern bloc.

  One difficulty in conjuring up genuine—as opposed to economic, or fake—refugees is a legacy of language. No one knows what to call Gypsies. Every language has a term that denotes a strictly social meaning. Cigan, tigan, Cygani, and of course “gypping” Gypsies—these terms are used as adjectives to describe behavior: heretical, rascally, cheating, thieving, hassling. In Eastern Europe, they can also signal flashiness, machismo, and ostentatious sentimentality (all fakery of a kind). And yet many Gypsies like the term Gypsy (rather in the way that “queer” is back in fashion among homosexuals), because they are defiant, not ashamed; and also because they don’t believe a new name will change the way people see them.

  Every country has another, more polite designation: Roma, Romanies, and (in Germany) “Sinti & Roma”; and these terms are often used by non-Gypsies to distinguish between people who are thought to be Gypsies by choice (following a “life-style”), and those who are members of some noble and, above all, vanished tribe.

  “Sinti & Roma” has superseded Zigeuner, a term which to German ears has begun to sound like “Negro,” if not quite like “nigger.” The new form is misleading as well (the distinction between the two names cannot be understood by nonspecialists, and so it seems a nervous, or safe, tautology, rather like “gay and lesbian”). In fact, the term Sinti & Roma is just the joining of two distinct Gypsy groups. More confusing still, since the name Roma has emerged as most Gypsies’ own favorite to denote all of their people, to say “Sinti & Roma” is also something like saying “Sephardim and Jews”—meaning Jews.

  While I was in Cottbus a journalist covering the antiforeigner attacks for a local newspaper was brought before the German press council for using the term Zigeuner. Nevertheless, these nuances have not yet been fully absorbed: in Bonn I bought a brand of crisps called “Zigeuner Chips” (“krosser, würziger!”—“crispier, spicier!”): “JewChips” in our analogy, and appropriate considering that Gypsies were murdered in their hundreds of thousands by the Nazis. You can find chocolate creams in Britain called “Gypsies”; but this was Germany, and Zigeuner recalled the “Z” tattoo on the arms of early Gypsy arrivals at Auschwitz.

  The recent violence was surely in part a bristling against the nervous pacifism that German history has mandated for this nation. Anti-Gypsyism was especially promising as a potential for catharsis. Whereas, by contrast, Germans would never be allowed to stop apologizing to Jews, hardly anyone was seriously troubled by the thought of the Gypsies’ feelings or their possible protests. Not even the Gypsies.

  The distinction between “genuine” and fake refugees appears in early anti-Gypsy legislation all over Europe, and in England, Scotland, and Germany in particular. In the German lands it was Bismarck who in 1886 first codified the already practiced discrimination between inländische Zigeuner and ausländische Zigeuner, or native and foreign Gypsies, which in turn became a handy device for ejecting anyone who wasn’t a local (while those who were recognized as inländische would be counted and monitored by the police). In the eighteenth century, borrowing a Dutch ta
ctic, Germans erected painted signs along the roads, graphically showing the beatings, floggings, and even hangings that apprehended Gypsies might expect. At the same time, it was announced, informers would be rewarded. Bounty hunting had begun. Intensive Heidenjachten (“heathen hunts”—but in fact Gypsy hunts) were a feature of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. A landowner in the Rhineland tallies among the bagged, that is, captured and killed, in his hunting log of 1835 “Gypsy woman and suckling babe.”

  Long before this had become popular sport, Denmark decreed capital punishment for Gypsy leaders in 1589, and fifty years later, Sweden specified hanging for all Gypsy males. Between 1471 and 1637, with none of the circumspection that has characterized European union in our time, the consolidating nation-states threw themselves into a cooperative of cruelty. Lucerne, Brandenburg, Spain, Germany, Holland, Portugal, England, Denmark, France, Flanders, Scotland, Bohemia, Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden respectively adopted anti-Gypsy legislation. There was hanging and expulsion in England; branding and the shaving of heads in the France of Louis XIV. Rival provinces distinguished themselves: Moravia severed the left ear of Gypsy women; Bohemia favored the right.

  And the Gypsies would not be hard to find. As early as 1686, Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg and foremost Protestant Prince in Germany, decreed that Gypsies were not to be allowed trade or shelter. As Angus Fraser points out in his thorough account of anti-Gypsy edicts, “in such regulations, the stigmatization which went back to the very earliest imperial legislation was reiterated without further discussion.” And so, by 1710, Prince Adolf Frederick of Mecklenburg-Strelitz propounded that even without criminal charges Gypsies could be flogged, branded, or expelled, and executed if they returned, whereas children under ten were to be removed and raised by Christian families. A year later, Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony authorized the shooting of Gypsies if they resisted arrest; in 1714 it was declared in the archbishopric of Mainz that all Gypsies were to be executed without trial on the grounds that their way of life had been outlawed. (In 1725, hanging was decreed in Prussia for all Gypsies over eighteen, without trial. By 1734, the age had been lowered to fourteen in some provinces, and a reward thrown in.) Even though Gypsies always traveled in small groups and posed mainly a danger to aesthetic sensibilities, the list goes on and on, with a continuing emphasis on genuine versus false Gypsies, and only minor variations on a violent theme. In 1905, Alfred Dillman wrote in his Zigeunerbuch (for use by the Interior Ministry of Security in Munich) that “almost no real Gypsies exist anymore.” And the next year, in Prussia, the first “prescription” came in “to combat the Gypsy uncreature”—the Zigeunerunwesen.