Description

The "gypsy" is a fiction that, unlike other fictions that have no counterpart in reality, is projected on living people, the Sinti and Roma, as well as on Traveling People like the Yeniche. But at the same time it is a construction created, modified and expanded by poets and scholars. Gypsies are suspected of "black art" and of being in league with the devil; they are denounced as dirty and repulsive, idlers, swindlers and thieves. Thus, the characteristics with which German poets have endowed their Gypsy figures contribute to Sinti and Roma still being excluded from society. This book examines gypsy images in German literature and science by presenting the distortions, denunciations and romanticizations that permeate German literary history on the basis of 36 characteristics attributed to "literary gypsies". The author explicitly takes a stand against the "Tsiganology" or "gypsy science", which is also decisively rejected by representatives of Sinti and Roma, with their essentialist-social-romantic attempt to scientifically define a "being" of Gypsyism.