Abstract
The interior ministry of the German Reich in Berlin provided few guidelines that addressed the Gypsy problem on a national level before World War I; its role was limited mainly to responding to the individual states’ plans for regulating Gypsies within their borders. While there were periodic efforts to create legislation on a national scale, these never met with success in the prewar period. Instead, the development of Gypsy policy took place mostly on a regional level, generally without the participation of legislative bodies, and was centered on the states that had populations of “native” Gypsies (Alsace, Prussia) or states which touched on an international border (Alsace again, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg). The administrative regulations issued by the regional state authorities were much more specific and detailed than the general guidelines issued from Rome to local prefects in Italy. The regulations separated Gypsies and “those who acted like them” more sharply from the indigent traveling population. In Germany, unlike in Italy, policy grew increasingly focused on removing Gypsies’ claims to German citizenship as well as nationality. As in Italy, those who “behaved like Gypsies” were, by definition, not German, yet Gypsies’ lack of a historical “nation” to refer back to or identify with left them without any definite national status.
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Notes
See Dieter Gosewinkel, “Citizenship in Germany and France at the Turn of the 20th Century,” in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (eds), Citizenship and National Identity in 20th Century Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27–39.
Dieter Gosewinkel, “Citizenship, Subjecthood, Nationality: Concepts of Belonging in the Age of Modern Nation States,” in Klaus Eder and Bernhard Giesen (eds), European Citizenship between National Legacies and Postnational Projects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20–1.
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001), 220.
Annemarie Sammartino, “After Brubaker: Citizenship in Modem Germany, 1848 to Today,” German History 27, no. 4 (2009): 587.
This treatment of Gypsies is somewhat comparable to the treatment of some Poles and Jews in unified Germany, whose claims to German nationality were denied and they were expelled. See Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen, 218–33 and Eli Nathans, Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2004), 111–68.
Geoff Eley, “Introduction,” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 4–6.
Lucassen also cites the example of hops-harvesting and Gypsies. See Leo Lucassen, Zigeuner: die Geschichte eines polizeilichen Ordnungsbegriffes im Deutschland, 1700–1945 (Köln: Böhlau, 1996), 179.
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 256.
Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 37.
Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Adriano Colocci, Gli Zingari: Storia di un popolo errante (Bologna: Fomi editore, 1889).
Alfred Dillmann, Zigeuner-Buch (München: Dr. Wild’sche Buchdruckerei, Gebr. Parais, 1905), 5.
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© 2014 Jennifer Illuzzi
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Illuzzi, J. (2014). Executive Struggles in Germany 1870–1909. In: Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401724_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401724_4
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