East Prussian Sinti and/as German expellees: beyond mémoires croisées

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• East Prussia
• Königsberg/Kaliningrad
• Sinti
• German memory
• photographs
• mnemonic solidarity
• virtual/online nostalgia communities
• refugees
• expellees

This article sets out some fragmentary evidence for the ways in which Romani and non-Romani Germans who lived in East Prussia before 1945 remember each other and their experiences of National Socialism and World War II. Rather than offering the results of a finished project, it reflects on that evidence and its implications for future research on the history of Sinti and Roma who were at home in the ‘German East’ and of the mnemonic practices they have developed since it ceased to be German. It also invites us, however, to consider Romani experience and memory in the light of the testimony of non-Romani Germans who shared their pre-war world and some of their wartime experiences, even though those non-Romani Germans have constructed their own, politically potent, edifice of memory.

As such, this article explores the relationship between two distinct memory communities: The first is that of non-Romani Germans settled in West Germany in the wake of their forced displacement from Eastern Europe (in this case East Prussia), who formed homeland associations (Landsmannschaften and Kreisgemeinschaften) in the first years after World War II to preserve memories of the world they had lost. Through their publications and agitation, they contributed significantly to the early construction of ‘flight and expulsion’ as a mnemonic trope – Mathias Heer (2011) calls it a cipher – that became a significant element of West German cultural memory. The second memory community is that of German Sinti and Roma who were victims of National Socialist persecution and genocide. By comparison with non-Romani refugees and expellees, Romani survivors came relatively late to forms of public commemoration and to claiming a space in national memory for their experiences. Memories of the genocide – and of life before the genocide – were and continue to be preserved and transmitted within families (cf. Bartash 2019), though in the German case the generational break that resulted from mass murder and sterilization was particularly radical and resulted in fragmentation and discontinuity at the level of communicative memory. Beginning largely in the 1980s, individual memories became public as personal testimony in filmed documentaries and printed memoirs. At the same time, narratives of collective experience emerged around key dates of commemoration (2 August) and sites of internment, enslavement, and murder (German concentration camps like Dachau, and of course Auschwitz). This focus on the end-points of the persecution foregrounded the national or pan-European character of the genocide, and in Germany the details and particularities of how the persecution began, proceeded and ended in specific places and communities have only become the object of commemoration since the end of the twentieth century (cf. Kapralski 2013).

In East Prussia, the two memory communities nevertheless have a shared point of origin, because East Prussian Sinti were settled and fully integrated into their rural communities, and in the light of this the article has three linked themes: The first is the way in which the recorded memories of both Sinti and gadje (i.e.,non-Romani) survivors confirm that integration and reflect nostalgia for a shared Heimat. More particularly, I observe that because of that condominium the artifacts of non-Romani memory – photographs and texts – contain evidence for aspects of Romani life before the genocide, which is particularly valuable in the light of the paucity of other sources. And I reflect on the implications of the fact that much of that material is now available on web-based platforms, both to the members of the memory communities themselves and to researchers. The second theme is the fact, evidenced in Sinti memory texts, that there were Sinti among the Germans who fled or were forcibly expelled from East Prussia after 1944. They remember those ‘German’ experiences of flight, expulsion, and resettlement in ways that echo their non-Romani contemporaries, without having (as far as we know) explicitly inserted themselves into the expellee memory community.

These observations arose at the intersection between two research projects. One of these is an empirical study of German Romani life before the genocide, in which – in keeping with a growing body of work in Romani history (Albrecht 2002; Tervonen 2010; Illuzzi 2019; Tauber 2019) – my focus is on the historical agency of Sinti and Roma as insiders to European society rather than as objects of policing and persecution. I recapitulate here some elements of a narrative case study and its sources, which have already been published as an outcome of that research (Rosenhaft 2022), because they seem suggestive of a wider phenomenon, which I explore here at greater length and with another purpose.

The other underlying project is an intervention in memory studies which explores the possibilities for ‘mnemonic solidarity’ (Lim and Rosenhaft 2021). That project developed out of the scholarly discussion that began in the 2000s about the ways in which different memory communities draw on the same (each other’s) tropes or morphemes (Rothberg 2011) of oppression and victimization to construct visions of the past and articulate their moral claims, whether as an observable consequence of the globalization of political discourse (Landsberg 2004; Levy and Sznaider 2006; Erll 2011; de Cesari and Rigney 2014), or as a conscious solidary construct (Rothberg 2009). ‘Mnemonic solidarity’ responds to the increasing ‘weaponization’ of such tropes (Holocaust, colonialism) in support of victimhood contests (particularly at the level of nation states) with a program of scholarly and practical critique: analyzing the mechanisms by which vernacular memories of suffering are translated into aggressive discourses at the level of cultural memory and exploring ways of bridging the victim-perpetrator binary by instantiating and acknowledging in practice the moral legitimacy of all those who partook in a historical moment as ‘implicated subjects’ (Rothberg 2019). Accordingly, the third theme of this article is formulated as a question directed to both historians and memory practitioners: How might these fragments of memory, parallel in their development and apparently divergent in their political implications, point us to ways of reconstructing the shared and hybrid communities of east central Europe that allow us both to fully appreciate the Romani presence and to bring divergent memory communities back into dialog? Recent developments in research on and commemoration of pre-war life in those multiethnic regions which are remembered among Germanists as the German East provide a fruitful context for thinking about what might (and might not) be possible in this regard. I end by comparing the case of East Prussian Sinti with recent scholarship on German-speaking Jews from the Bukovina, which displays some structural similarities with the Baltic as a locus of entangled memories.

Sinti in East Prussia

My reflections on this topic were prompted by my research on the life of an East Prussian Sinto, Reinhard Florian. He was born in 1923 in a village near Insterburg (now Chernyakovsk), in what was then German East Prussia and since 1945 has been the Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave of Russia. He experienced the National Socialist persecution of Sinti and Roma as a teenager: At the age of 14 he had to leave school and work as a laborer on a farm which was so far away from his home that he lost all contact with his parents. In February 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo and spent 10 months in various prisons before being sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. He was deployed to the Gusen sub-camp and in May 1943 he was sent to work in the IG-Farben plant in Auschwitz-Monowitz. In the last months of the war, he was returned to Mauthausen. Further transfers and death marches followed, and he was finally liberated from Ebensee on 6 May 1945. He lived in Bavaria after the war, his choice of residence guided by information received from fellow Romani survivors (an example of informal communication practices that Volha Bartash 2022 has called the ‘Romani post’), and the same networks re-united him with his brother and father, the only other members of his family who had survived. Like most East Prussian Sinti, Florian’s father and stepmother had been transported to Białystok in 1942 with their nine children. There they were crammed into the city prison for several months, before being sent for internment in the ghetto in Brest-Litovsk, most of whose Jews had already been murdered. In April 1944, those who had survived Białystok were deported to the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Shortly before the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ was liquidated, Florian’s father and brother were transported back to Germany and slave labor in Dora-Mittelbau, where they were liberated (Florian 2012; cf. Holler 2018).

In the first years after the war, Florian chose not to talk about his experiences, maintaining an embittered silence which was deepened by the failure of his first application for compensation. It was only when the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma (Zentralrat deutscher Sinti und Roma) asked that he testify on behalf of another applicant, and his own second application succeeded with the help of the Zentralrat, that he began to speak. Beginning with a filmed interview for the USC Shoah Foundation, he devoted the last two decades of his life to public testimony and activism. He played a leading role in the initiative that led to the creation of the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism, which opened in 2012.

My initial interest in Florian arose from a project that had little to do with Holocaust or Holocaust memory – although in the end it brought home to me how far the study of Romani history in Germany still depends on the testimony of genocide survivors and how compulsively it recurs to the genocide as to an open wound. Rather, I was looking at Reinhard Florian in the context of a study of Romani horse dealers, part of a European collaboration exploring the Romani contribution to Europe’s public spaces. The presence of Sinti and Roma shaped the character and operation of many rural and urban horse markets in Germany well into the twentieth century. As sites of social interaction that combine economic exchanges with leisure activities, horse fairs offered opportunities for structured interactions between Romani and non-Romani actors which both called for displays of cultural particularity and promoted intercultural competence. One of my case studies is Europe’s largest annual horse fair, which took place at Wehlau, not far from where Reinhard Florian grew up (Rosenhaft 2022). Florian’s father was a successful horse dealer and his published memoirs provide the most detailed account available of the Wehlau fair. In fact, it is the only German account from the Romani perspective of the business of buying and selling, and of interactions between Romani and non-Romani traders. Following the clues in his memoirs, I was able to reconstruct some of his family’s history going back to the early nineteenth century.

While horse fairs are particularly significant as spaces in which Romani and non-Romani strangers met on common ground, the fact is that in East Prussia fairs and markets were not the only contact zones. In that region, Sinti and gadje lived side by side. In 1842, Carl von Heister reported in his ‘ethnographic and historical notes’ about East Prussian Sinti who wore the same clothes and spoke the same Low German as other villagers. They were not only sedentary, but often lived in the same houses as non-Sinti, as lodgers or laborers, housemaids, nurses, or spinners. While most Sinti belonged to the lowest strata of the rural proletariat, Reinhard Florian’s forebears included tenant farmers, property owners, artisans, and peddlers. Heister commented that the non-Sinti neighbors of one family ‘gave a good account of this family and said the Gypsies were good, respectable people’ (von Heister 1842, 144–7). By the twentieth century, the East Prussian Sinti were so much like their neighbors that the ‘race scientist’ Robert Ritter, who initiated the project of identifying and classifying all German ‘Gypsies’ as a prelude to Heinrich Himmler’s ‘Solution of the Gypsy Question’, found them too settled, too little inclined to criminality, and too unmusical to be ‘authentic’ (Holler 2018, 96).

This degree of assimilation did not prevent their being subject to the same kinds of harassment and persecution as other German ‘Gypsies’, and one consequence of that is the relative paucity of evidence about their daily lives before the 1930s. A high proportion of Holocaust survivors were too young to have remembered details about pre-war life, while the dispersal and destruction of households that began with forced internment in the mid-1930s, and the difficulty of carrying personal property into emigration, has left relatively few private artifacts to testify to family histories. In the East Prussian case, individual artifacts that have survived, like the photo of the Ernst family (possibly relatives of Reinhard Florian’s stepmother) from the archives of the Documentation and Cultural Center of Germany’s Sinti and Roma (Figure 1), confirm the literary sources which picture East Prussian Sinti as ordinary Germans. But very few of them have come to light. And the region’s wartime and postwar vicissitudes mean that the public record is also very limited. At the best of times, the archival record on Sinti and Roma is peculiarly characterized by gaps and silences (Bartash 2019), by their ‘absent presence’ (Matthews 2015), and where Romani subjects appear in the archives the data provided are limited as a result of being filtered through the police eye. In East Prussia, the state, regional, and municipal archives which might have preserved traces (however problematic) have largely been lost through wartime destruction and the vagaries of shifting borders and regime change.

Figure 1. The Ernst family, East Prussian Sinti, ca. 1905 (Archiv Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma).

East Prussian gadje remember the Sinti

In the light of this, the reconstruction of Romani pasts calls for multidisciplinary work (Tauber and Trevisan 2019), ingenuity, and openness to serendipity. In my own research, memories of non-Sinti East Prussians proved to be an important source, supplementing and corroborating Reinhard Florian’s testimony. The Sinti who are lost to the archives are still present in the publications of the local and regional sub-groups of the German Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, BdV), the Homeland Association of East Prussia (Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen), and the local associations (Kreisgemeinschaften) of the historical rural and urban districts of the former German province. Established as local organizations in West Germany as early as 1946, these groups spoke for the interests of Germans who fled East Prussia in the last months of the war or were expelled in the postwar settlement, and once under the umbrella of the BdV they acted as a lobby for revision of the postwar borders, with the encouragement of West German governments (Faehndrich 2011, 69–70; Becker 2013, 420–2). But they also helped to constitute and maintain those who identified as subject-victims of ‘flight and expulsion’ as a memory community; for a significant proportion of them, associational activity was directed primarily at the cultivation of memory and the imaginative reconstruction of Heimat rather than the material recovery of lost territories (Demshuk 2012, 8). Since the 1990s, the associations have increasingly taken on the character of virtual nostalgia communities.

Into the 1970s, the newspaper of the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen and the bulletin of the Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau regularly published articles about the Wehlau horse fair, and those articles almost always mention Sinti and Roma horse dealers. Other articles, too, recall interactions with Sinti part of village life. One woman’s reminiscence is a reminder of how peddling and begging on the part of Sinti women were intrinsic to the gendered economy of their village communities. The police and other hostile observers complained that farm wives, approached by ‘Gypsy’ women while their husbands were away in the fields, were too generous, tolerant, or fearful to take a stand against the ‘Gypsy nuisance’. By contrast, this East Prussian woman, recalling an example of ‘Gypsy’ eloquence, offers a snapshot of relations of good-humored mutual regard:

It once happened that a Gypsy woman wanted to get some bread from a farm wife. But the woman didn’t have much herself; she had had to keep postponing her baking day because there was too much work to be done in the fields. And she explained that to the Gypsy, because she normally never let someone who came to her door go away empty handed. The Gypsy accepted her explanation, but remarked: “Still, madam, let me give you a housekeeping lesson: Before you cut into your last loaf, make sure you’ve started the dough for the next one.” (Patzelt-Hennig 1975)

Intensive cultivation of the memory of a lost homeland shared among non-Sinti East Prussians has thus created a valuable archive, and this has visual as well as textual elements. The exchange of photos was always a feature of associational life and memory work among German expellees; in the early decades of their history, this took collective form at their annual gatherings, which included slideshows (Demshuk 2012, 163). The Heimatbücher produced by expellees, publications preserving remembered features of the places left behind, were often illustrated with photographs from family collections as well as hand-drawn maps and plans (Faehndrich 2011, 220–28). Digital technologies have made it possible to share both rich photographic collections and publications via the internet, on web platforms, which are also accessible to people who are not members of the expellee community itself. The online photographic archive of the Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau provides a unique documentation of the Wehlau horse fair, in more than 100 photos (out of a total of about 20,000 on the site), and these include images of Sinti at the fair.¹ Photos of men include a series that shows the steps in the negotiation around the sale of a horse by a Romani dealer (Figure 2), while those of women document the spatial order of the fair: The wagons of the Sinti and Roma were parked on a field at the edge of the fair ground. Romani women and children normally stayed with the wagons (Figure 3), and non-Romani fairgoers visited them there to enjoy the exotic spectacle or have their fortunes told (Figure 4) (cf. Löffler 1873).

Figure 2. Romani horse dealers at the Wehlau horse fair, ca. 1935 (Bildarchiv Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau, www.kreisgemeinschaft-wehlau.de, 111–0725).

Figure 3. Romani women at the Wehlau horse fair (www.flickr.com/photos/27639553@N05/15111124393). Every effort has been made to identify the copyright holder.

Figure 4. In the Romani camp at the Wehlau horse fair (Bildarchiv Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau, www.kreisgemeinschaft-wehlau.de, 111–0752).

A series of photos portraying the procession to celebrate the 600^th anniversary of Wehlau’s city charter in 1936 testifies to the close association between the city’s self-image, the horse fair, and the ‘Gypsy’ presence. It included a float representing the horse fair, which took the form of a covered wagon with the name of an actual Sinti family from the region painted on the side (as was required of itinerant traders by law), driven by a family of gadje dressed as Sinti (Figure 5). Other Wehlauers, too, dressed up as ‘Gypsies’ for the occasion.

Figure 5. The float representing the horse fair at the 600th anniversary celebrations of the city of Wehlau, 1936 (Postcard) (Bildarchiv Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau, www.kreisgemeinschaft-wehlau.de, 111–0584).

Documents not of Sinti life but of orientalist cultural appropriation (cf. Lee 2000), these jubilee photos remind us of the ambivalence inherent in the long tradition of non-Roma depicting Roma – an ambivalence particularly acute in the case of photography (Rosenhaft 2008; Reuter 2014; About, Pernot, and Sutre 2017). None of the memories of Sinti by gadje cited above refers even implicitly to the National Socialist persecution. Sinti and Roma (like Jews) were banned from the Wehlau horse fair in July 1938, but those memory texts do not reflect on their disappearance from the market scene, let alone their marginalization in and deportation from the villages (cf. Traba 2003, 294). While the other photographs reproduced below (Figures 2–4) have undoubted documentary value, this silence on the fate of their subjects may be read as evidence that for the non-Romani memory community they functioned after the war as picturesque figures in a mnemonic landscape (cf. Williams 2008, 53) rather than objects of empathy.

At the same time, acts of mimicry in the Wehlau parade suggest that at the time the photos were taken there existed a high degree of mutual familiarity and even intimacy between Sinti and gadje. There is still more compelling evidence of this intimacy in a photo from the Kreisgemeinschaft Gumbinnen (now Gusev) which features in the on-line archive of the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen (Figure 6). The caption that appears on the main screen – ‘Tellrode, Gypsies at the Rominte [River] 1932’ – tells us little about the people or the circumstances pictured. But the metadata that can be accessed by a click on this carefully curated site are more eloquent. The photo is described in greater detail, and we learn who the subjects were, where they were going, and exactly where the photo was taken: ‘The Dombrowski family from Goldap, washing their horses in the Rominte as they prepare for the horse market in Gumbinnen. Horse pond near Mathes Maukel’s farm’. According to a chronicle compiled after World War II, Mathes Maukel was the proprietor of a farm of 6.7 hectares and also of a smithy (Chronik Tellrode n.d., 604). Perhaps he got to know Sinti horse dealers through his activities as a blacksmith. In any case, the description of the picture – presumably copied from notes on the back of the photo, though the original photo has been lost – indicates that the photographer (or owner of the photo) and the subjects of the photo knew each other. These Sinti are figures in a landscape, to be sure, but figures with names and lives to live.

Figure 6. ‘Tellrode, Gypsies at the Rominte 1932’ (Bildarchiv Ostpreußen, www.bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de/index.html.de, ID044888)

East Prussian Sinti remember ‘home’

The name of the ‘Gypsies at the Rominte’, recorded by their gadje neighbors as Dombrowski, also points to the ways in which the memory of home and its destruction developed in parallel in the two communities. Amanda Dambrowski, a Sintizza who – in spite of the difference in spelling of the name – may well have been a daughter of the family in the Tellrode photo, reported on her wartime experiences in 1981. The Dambrowskis owned an eight-hectare farm, which they had bought in the middle of the nineteenth century; the adult children of the family also worked on neighboring farms and the men traded in horses. In early 1942, they were interned in Białystok along with other East Prussian Sinti, including Reinhard Florian’s family. After eight months of hardship, Amanda’s grandmother took the opportunity of an official visit by Berlin Gestapo officers to request that her family be released: they were property owners, she argued, had supplied milk to her neighbors and pigs to the army, and her husband was a decorated veteran of the First World War. Her request was forwarded to Berlin, and the family was allowed to return home to Goldap. They were met at the station there by neighbors, who reported: ‘The Gestapo asked us whether you should be allowed to return, and we all signed’ (Dambrowski 1981, 74).

The condition for the Dambrowskis’ release was agreeing to be sterilized, and in Amanda’s case, this involved a forced abortion. Unable to return to their farm, they had to live in a barracks and carry out forced labor. Under National Socialism, then, Sinti remained outsider-insiders in their own communities, and that position was reinforced by the ‘racial state’ with a radically new degree of brutality, even where they escaped deportation and murder. In the closing months of the war, however, they faced the same challenges and hardships as other East Prussians. The first orders to evacuate the north of the province, where Goldap lay, were issued in the face of the Soviet offensive in late summer of 1944. Amanda fled with her children and grandmother and made her way on foot and by rail to Hirschfeld (now Jelonki) in Pomerania. Like many others, she returned to Goldap in September, only to be displaced again during the final evacuation of the city in October 1944. Her family were thus among the roughly 900,000 Germans who were forced to make their way westward in the winter of 1944–45, on foot and under threat equally from the weather and the Red Army. The situation of the population that remained in East Prussia under Soviet occupation was notoriously desperate (Willems 2018), and between the summer of 1945 and 1948 the remaining Germans suffered internment, forced labor, and repatriation to Germany, sometimes following a period of forced resettlement in Poland (Hahn and Hahn 2010).

Among the traumatic experiences of those months that Amanda Dambrowski recounts in her testimony, which include the brutality of the Russian troops and her own fear of rape, she reports one that she remembers particularly vividly, and in terms that are familiar from numerous narratives of flight from the East:

One thing I can’t forget is crossing a bridge in 1944, it was terribly cold. The bridge was jammed with treks. We had yoked up the horses without shoeing them. The bridge was iced over and you could see big holes, it was rotten. We had just reached the opposite bank when the bridge collapsed behind us, throwing people and animals into the icy water. We were the last to reach the shore (Dambrowski 1981, 75).

The illustrations to her testimony include a photograph of the official document identifying her mother as a refugee/expellee, which was issued in 1956.

The Dambrowskis were not alone in being both ‘Gypsies’ and ‘expellees’, and other examples make clear the variety of ways in which this dual status could play out. Reimar Gilsenbach, the East German dissident and an early proponent of Roma rights, reported having met a young Sintizza whom he calls Duane in the mid-1960s. Her mother had been sent from their home in East Prussia to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp with her two daughters, and Duane, a third daughter, was born in the camp. Following the liberation, the family returned to their home village and a life not unlike the one they had lived before the war, with neighbors wary but helpful. In the following months, however, they were interned with other Germans who had not already fled. After four years they were expelled and settled in the GDR. There they were formally recognized as victims of Nazism. Like the status of expellee enjoyed by Amanda Dambrowski’s family in West Germany, this incurred benefits and privileges in the East. But because Duane’s family were Sinti they enjoyed none of the associated benefits until Gilsenbach took up their case with the local authorities. Tellingly, when he met them they were among the last families living in the emergency housing they had been allocated fifteen years earlier – among other ‘refugee families who hadn’t succeeded in making a new start’ (Gilsenbach 1993, 262–4).

The Dambrowskis fared better, at least to the extent of being able to choose their final place of settlement. Once they had been ‘de-loused and powdered’ in a reception camp in Lower Saxony and were allowed to move on, Amanda’s mother decided to head for East Frisia, ‘because [she] imagined that East Frisia must be like East Prussia … the land flowing with milk and honey’ (Dambrowski 1981, 75). And, to return to Reinhard Florian, a similar nostalgia for a lost Heimat (cf. Zwicker 2010) is expressed in the title of his 2012 memoir: Ich wollte nach Hause – nach Ostpreußen! (I wanted to go home – to East Prussia). ‘Why us?’ he asks in the voice of his 14-year-old self:

We were all Germans. We all spoke the same language, East Prussian Plattdeutsch, we all lived in the same village, swam in the Pissa, the stream that flowed there. We all loved the landscape. Our home. We simple country folk were all poor. Maybe the “Gypsies” were a little poorer than the others. But even among the non-Gypsies there were plenty of people who didn’t have enough money to pay the rent und had to work as agricultural laborers for their landlords to cover the cost (Florian 2012, 240).

In Florian’s case, there is genuine ambivalence in the way this vision of the pre-genocide past jostles with the bitterness engendered by his wartime experience. In interviews more than in his published memoirs – which as in the case of many German survivors of the Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma have to be read in the light of their mediation by sympathetic gadje – he resolutely refused to adopt a discourse of consolation or reconciliation (Florian 2011). But he, too, is an example of how Romani and non-Romani East Prussians of the wartime generation share the language of a remembered experience of home and its violent loss and a nostalgia for the community they shared in a place that is no longer on the map.

Contests and convergences: generational shifts, archives at risk, and new prospects for mnemonic solidarity

The politics of German wartime memory has placed the memories of Romani and non-Romani East Prussians in implicit conflict with each other. At the founding of the BdV, the majority of the members of its executive council had been members or open supporters of the Nazi Party (Schwartz 2016), and from its beginnings the Bund pursued policies that were radically anti-communist and irredentist. The organized refugees and expellees from the East thus stood on the far right of the West German political spectrum, and since the 1990s a newly respectable discourse of the wartime suffering of the Germans, initially deployed to relativize the Holocaust, has drawn heavily on their memory narratives (Kift 2010; Cordell 2013; Eigler 2014, 23–60; Becker 2013, 402–15). In terms of the victim-perpetrator binary, still present in much Holocaust memory discourse, then, Sinti and gadje East Prussians stand tendentially on opposite ‘sides’. The evidence suggests, however, that vernacular memory preserves a shared dwelling space, and the non-Romani East Prussian memory community has effectively re-created just that space through the virtual exchange of texts and photographs.

This memory community is in danger of dying out as the first generation of rememberers ages. In 2019, the editor of the annual bulletin of the Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau reported with regret that members born after 1950 were showing little interest in getting actively involved in the organization (“Neuer Vorstand für vier Jahre” 2019). The future of the carefully assembled photo archives of the Kreisgemeinschaften is similarly uncertain. Many, perhaps most of the photos now exist only in digital form, and they are in a significant sense ‘orphan works’, their provenance unrecorded (cf. Campt 2012, 86–91). This is the case with the Tellrode photo, making it impossible – as noted above – to trace the photographer, the donor, or the author of the description that features in the metadata. The Bildarchiv Ostpreußen, maintained by the Landsmannschaft, is the only photo archive that has had some success in systematically raising funds to employ an archivist.² In 2021 the president of the Kreisgemeinschaft Wehlau was a native of Königsberg living in a small town near Bremen. The websites of the Kreisgemeinschaften deliver to the virtual visitor a vivid experience of pre-war East Prussia and its people as an integral community – a space crowded with Germans. It can thus come as a shock to be reminded that the owners and subjects of the photos are now scattered and the Heimatmuseen (local history museums) of their hometowns are not in East Prussia but in West German towns and villages, often places with a substantial refugee population that adopted the role of Patenstädte (godfather towns) in the postwar decades (Demshuk 2014). Among Sinti, too, there are ever fewer witnesses to life in the pre-war German East. Reinhard Florian died in 2014.

This raises two challenges for scholars and activists looking to construct from these fragments of memory a picture of the past which is ‘usable’ (White 2014, 99; Kraenzle and Mayr 2017), both for re-visioning lost life-worlds and for building a more humane future. First, how and how far is it possible to preserve the traces and recover the history of ethnically diverse communities which we glimpse in these visual and textual fragments and reinvigorate it as a positive model for a shared future? And second, how can the memory communities of Sinti and Roma on the one hand and of ‘Germans’ and ‘Europeans’ on the other be reconstituted as a solidary community in whose vision of the past ‘Gypsies’ figure as active subjects of a shared history?

There are positive signs, on the level of vernacular memory as well as in the public sphere. A conversation I had (Bremen, 11 March 2021) with a Sinto who was born in Bremerhaven in the 1970s provided an example of the experiences of the wartime generation informing the discursive world of their children – beyond the familiar fact of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and in ways that affirm a shared history. His family was able to evade deportation to Auschwitz and spent the last months of the war in their hometown, Greifenhagen (now Gryfino) in Pomerania. His brief account of their experiences drew on familiar narrative tropes: flight, resettlement in Schleswig-Holstein, and the move to Bremerhaven in the 1950s to take up work in the port, none of which erased his mother’s sense of belonging to Pomerania (cf. Balke 2022). This suggests that there is still scope for new research at this frontier, especially by oral historians and historical ethnographers. At the same time, the turn of generations is producing new curiosity about the past and new virtual nostalgia communities among non-Romani displaced families, and these are bringing forward new visual sources for shared histories: In an e-mail to me (7 October 2021) Volha Bartash reported finding rare photographic evidence for the lives of Lithuanian Roma on the memory site set up by the son of a Polish family which had been re-settled from the east to the west of the country as part of the postwar population transfers (cf. Bartash 2021; Faehndrich 2011, 109–10).³

This is in keeping with the ways in which the layered histories of the German East as a multicultural space, including the complex legacies of the war and postwar experiences, have emerged as a new horizon both for research and in public memory cultures. In fact, Russian East Prussia has received relatively little attention in this context (cf. Traba 2003; Berger 2010; Neumarker 2013; Dementyev 2015). It is in encounters between Germans and Poles that this new openness to interchange is most apparent – at memorial sites, in museums and in imaginative literature (Hahn and Traba 2012–15; Stettiner and Szczeciner 2010; Draesner 2014). This readiness to understand the wartime and postwar displacements as shared experiences is also reflected in a shift in the profile of the BdV, which has distanced itself from its originary chauvinism with the creation of a Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen (Center against Expulsions, ZgV) framed in global humanitarian terms, informed by the ‘recognition … that it is necessary to stop dwelling on our own suffering, our own traumatic memories, and create an instrument that will help to see expulsion and genocide outlawed as political methods’.⁴ The Center provides the frame for the exhibition Verschwundene Orte (Vanished Places), which closes with a section on Erinnerung und Versöhnung (Memory and Reconciliation).⁵ Similarly, the current BdV President, Bernd Fabritius, as Federal Commissioner for Matters Related to Ethnic German Resettlers and National Minorities since 2018, regularly participates in Sinti and Roma cultural and memorial events (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture 2018; European Commission 2020; Fabritius 2020, 2021).

There is no need to posit a fundamental change of heart on the part of the BdV in order to recognize the signs here that the wider memorial context has changed. The creation of the ZvG provoked acrimonious controversy at home and abroad (cf. Kift 2010, 80–84; Cordell 2013, 111–12; Becker 2013, 420–71), and in terms of memory politics it can be viewed as an act of expediency. In his overtures to the Roma community, Fabritius has never made public reference to the things that Romani Germans and ‘his’ community of expellees and resettlers have in common as survivors of war, forced displacement, and mass killing. Since 1998 Sinti and Roma have been officially acknowledged as a protected national minority in the Federal Republic, alongside Frisians, Sorbs and Danes, and it may well be that it is their current cohabitation in that bureaucratic-political ‘box’ rather than any sense of a shared past that frames his political actions. But the shift of emphasis, including BdV concessions to Romani memory, reveal that the atmosphere inside that box has changed significantly. The active mobilization of the Romani community since the 1980s, which achieved both the grant of minority status and the public acknowledgment and commemoration of the genocide, has re-written the terms of the conversation. Moreover, Fabritius’ election as BdV president marks a significant temporal shift: Born in Romania in 1965 and emigrating at the age of 20, he is seen as a conciliatory figure within the association and represents a generation of beneficiaries of West German nationality policy who have no direct connection to the traumatic moment of expellee memory (“Bernd Fabritius – Hoffnungsträger des Bundes der Vertriebenen” 2014).

Finally, though, the difficulty of parsing these gestures at the level of official memorial cultures is a reminder of just how complex and varied the wartime experience was in East Central Europe. More particularly, it brings home the challenges as well as the opportunities presented by the ways in which multiple experiences – each lived individually, in families or ethnic communities but interconnected with those of others in shared spaces – have come to be voiced as memories and claims on the present in the past thirty years. Mémoires croisées (Kovács 2006) have become layered, entangled, and even knotted (Lim 2021).

The Bukovina as a counterexample (conclusion and outlook)

I have argued that the evidence I offer for such entanglements in the lives and memories of Sinti and gadje in East Prussia, while hardly more than suggestive, points toward new directions in both the study of Romani history and memory practices. The particularities of German Romani experience that both these fields have to take into account are very well highlighted by a comparison with recent scholarship on memories of the Bukovina and its principal city Czernowitz/Cernăuți/Czernivtsi. As a territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Bukovina was home to multiple ethnic communities, whose relatively peaceful co-existence came under pressure after it was ceded to Romania in 1918 (Hausleitner 2001); in 1940 it was divided between Romania and the Ukrainian SSR. The Bukovina’s substantial German population included a high proportion of assimilated Jews. It is thus an object of memory for both Jewish and non-Jewish German-speakers who survived successive waves of murderous violence and forced displacement.

In the past twenty years scholars have given attention to recovering the memories of Jewish survivors (Coldewey et al. 2003) and exploring their institutionalized memory community (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010, 2011). Gaëlle Fisher (2020) has analyzed the two memory communities – Jewish and non-Jewish – and the relationships between them. These display some features very similar to the ones I’ve described above and some very striking differences. For example, Hirsch and Spitzer identified the significance and imaginative power of websites as platforms for sharing images and reconstructing the past, particularly for the second and third generations of Jewish survivors; as one British son of survivors put it, ‘It was only with the advent of the Internet that Czernowitz began to take concrete shape in my mind.’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2011, 59). Fisher has widened the lens to juxtapose and compare memory practices among Jewish Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish expellees respectively. She reflects on these in terms of the emerging trend to recover and reevaluate the multicultural dimension of the Bukovina (and by extension the wider German East), but identifies memory practices that, while structurally very similar, are not so much parallel (in the sense in which I have used it above) as radically divergent in their political outcomes. Both survivor communities organized themselves as Landsmannschaften in the 1950s, but they did so separately – the expellees in Germany and the Holocaust survivors in Israel and the diaspora. Both have engaged in nostalgia or roots tourism in the Bukovina since the 1990s, but in the case of Jewish survivors, visits center on sites of persecution (or on hometowns and villages that became sites of persecution), and thus act as a constant reminder that the multiethnic community of the past was a dangerous illusion rather than something to be remembered with affection. As Fisher also articulates, this refusal of nostalgia reflects the radical brutality of the Shoah: While there was once a shared Heimat here, there is no shared experience of its loss, because the conditions under which Jews and other Germans were forced out were so radically different: Jews subject to massacre and internal deportation by Romanian civilians, military and state, non-Jewish Germans resettled to Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940–41 and then expelled from Poland at the end of the war. Moreover, the survivors almost universally went in opposite directions. While non-Jewish expellees eventually reached Germany, Jewish survivors either joined a new diaspora or settled in Israel. And, of course, the nation-building process in which they were actively or passively engaged in Israel informed the ways in which they pictured the Bukovina and their former non-Jewish neighbors.

From many points of view, then, the case of Jewish and non-Jewish German memories of the Bukovina seems incommensurate with that of Romani and gadje memories of East Prussia. There is rarely any place of ‘return’ or roots tourism for German Sinti and Roma. The sites of pilgrimage that the war left them are not their former homes but those that mark the stations of their persecution: Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The Romani associational life that emerged in the 1980s has developed around their shared experience as a racialized minority, which informs both their memorial culture and their future-oriented social and political projects. But Fisher’s exploration of what is and is not possible in the mnemonic recovery of shared spaces and experiences is instructive both in methodological terms and in highlighting the peculiarities of the Romani experience. Those peculiarities are by now familiar and can be articulated in contrast with the features that define Jewish Holocaust memory: Romani experiences of persecution across Europe were particularly diffuse and varied, in terms equally of the agents of persecution (local and national authorities as well as German occupation forces) and the forms of abuse, detention, incarceration, and physical displacement that they suffered, up to but not always including massacres and mass death in camps. They involved, in varying degrees, a continuation and intensification of pre-war police and social control practices, in many though not all cases explicitly allied with instruments of ‘racial hygiene’ (Weiss-Wendt, ed. 2013). In the absence of European-wide networks, let alone the global diasporic structures and media available to Jewish victims, the persecution of the Roma could not easily be communicated or processed as a collective, Europe-wide experience either as it was going on or in its immediate aftermath. The absence of such an infrastructure for memory and advocacy is key to the failure of postwar societies to acknowledge the genocide, a structural incapacity as well as a refusal to hear the testimony of Romani victims, even as victim testimony was becoming established as the touchstone for authenticity in accepting the Shoah as a foundational narrative for the postwar world (Margalit 2001; von Dem Knesebeck 2011; Joskowicz 2016; Donert and Rosenhaft 2021). And – closely related to this – there was no equivalent in the Romani experience to the foundation of the state of Israel, which in the medium term adopted the role of inheritor and defender of Shoah memory and by its very existence offered Jewish survivors an alternative homeland and ethno-national identity.

German Sinti like the Florians and the Dambrowskis thus had very few alternatives to reconstructing their lives within German society, even if they rarely did this in the communities where they had lived before the war. Moreover, the terms in which they had to argue individually and collectively for acknowledgment, against a system that denied their right to compensation until the 1960s and continued to obstruct their claims even after that, called for repeated re-assertion of their Germanness (von dem Knesebeck 2011). Sinti and Roma who survived the genocide remain both Germans and victims-of-the-Germans in ways and degrees that only the experience of the very few Jewish survivors who returned to Germany after 1945 compares with.

To return to the core theme of this article, the paradox is most profound for those who suffered both as ‘Gypsies’ and as Germans. And in terms of memory structures and practices, the example of German-speaking Jews from the Bukovina presents a model of distancing oneself from pre-war identities (physically and emotionally) which was not available to their Sinti contemporaries. Accordingly, where we find Landsmannschaften among Jewish survivors, the recorded experiences of Sinti from the German East offer only scraps of evidence for converging and diverging identities and shared life worlds under circumstances of persecution and displacement.

What the Bukovina has in common with the Baltic region is that history of multiethnic condominium that defies shifting national borders and calls on historians to keep in reserve a different set of maps, defined by the movements of ordinary people and their respective senses of community and belonging and subject to constant revision. They also share the opportunities for re-visioning and new empirical research that opened up with the ‘unfreezing’ of memory following the end of the Cold War – opportunities realized in the curiosity and openness of post-survivor generations and the exchange of memories on the internet. The evidence I provide above for the ways in which members of a settled Romani community have remembered and been remembered by their German neighbors is frustratingly fragmentary, but the possibilities it opens up for new perspectives on German Romani identity, memory and memorial practices, merit further exploration.

Acknowledgments

The empirical research underlying this article was carried out in the context of the project BESTROM, financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by NCN, Academy of Finland, AHRC, AEI and the European Commission through Horizon 2020. My research in Romani history was also supported by the AHRC through Academic Networks Grant AH/P007260/1 (Legacies of the Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945) (2017-19). The Mnemonic Solidarity project is based in the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul, and much of my personal research and writing for both projects was carried out during a period of residence as Visiting Research Professor there (2018–20), supported by the Korean Government through a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant (NRF-2017S1A6A3A01079727).

I am grateful to Volha Bartash, Gaëlle Fisher, and two anonymous JBS reviewers for comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/P007260/1]; Humanities in the European Research Area [Project BESTROM]; National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2017S1A6A3A01079727].

Notes on contributors

Eve Rosenhaft

Eve Rosenhaft is Professor Emerita of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool (UK). She has taught and published widely on aspects of German social history since the eighteenth century, and her current scholarship and public engagement focus on Romani and Afro-German history. Her publications include Black Germany (2013); The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945 (2021); European Roma: Lives beyond Stereotypes (2022).

Notes

1. http://www.kreisgemeinschaft-wehlau.de (accessed 12 January 2022).

2. https://www.bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de/donate.html.de (accessed 12 January 2022).

3. http://www.podbrozie.info.pl (accessed 12 January 2022).

4. https://www.bund-der-vertriebenen.de/zentrum-gegen-vertreibungen (accessed 12 January 2022).

5. https://www.ausstellung-verschwundeneorte.de (accessed 12 January 2022).