by Becky Taylor
Be informed that nomadic bands all over France and abroad obey a leader living in Paris. It is of capital interest to discover this leader and to know the nature of the links uniting the nomads, the orders he gives them and the missions he entrusts them.
This was of course pure fantasy, but that fact did not stop the arrest and questioning of a Russian Gypsy, Petro Boumbay for this very reason.50 In fact evidence from the 1895 census suggests that fears over their disloyalty and their ‘foreignness’ far outweighed their actual presence: the itinerant total was put at 400,000, of which 25,000 were ‘nomads travelling in groups and in caravans’, and the majority of names returned were Gypsies with French nationality. Also numerically significant were Manouches, many of whom had left Alsace-Lorraine after German annexation, along with Piedmontese Sinti, who were often recorded as basket makers, hawkers and accordion players and were most numerous in the Auvergne. In contrast only very small numbers of Gypsies from central or eastern Europe were recorded across France.51 Debates over the census, as well as earlier directives over ‘nomadic criminals’, show how the presence of Gypsies intersected with issues of national identity and foreignness, as well as with the perennial question of how to deal with the overlapping criminal and vagrant populations. As with earlier periods, assumptions remained that these categories were natural bedfellows, and that Gypsies represented a challenge to both national and social boundaries.
Although the preoccupation with Gypsies as criminal and foreigners outside the nation state was also a strong presence in Germany, the path it took was rather different. To understand this we need to reflect for a moment on the particularities of Germany’s relationship with nationalism and modernization. Germany, as a unified state did not emerge until 1871, and despite rationalization, even at the end of the Napoleonic wars it remained a patchwork of 39 city and regional states. Given impetus by Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 and then the national War of Liberation (1813–15), the decades leading up to unification were ones in which the idea of Germanness and of nation were intensely debated, with writers articulating, celebrating and politicizing the uniqueness of being German.52 Yet, unlike some other European countries that were able to construct simple (if inaccurate) narratives linking the dominant peoples in the contemporary nation state with historical ancestors and a particular territory, in Germany this simply was not possible. While the peoples of central Europe may have maintained degrees of distinctiveness, intermixing clearly had taken and continued to take place. Equally, due to patterns of medieval and early modern migration, significant German populations lived outside Prussia, the German Confederation and Austria, most notably in parts of Russia.53 Put simply, many of those within Germany did not speak German nor identify as German, while there were many well beyond the German heartland who did.
In order to move beyond this difficulty, a narrative was constructed in which the cultural traditions of the Germania identified by Tacitus could be shown to be handed down from one people to another through a chain of intercultural exchange. It allowed a seemingly fragile national identity to simultaneously claim a Teutonic heritage while suggesting it was cultural continuity and autonomy, not blood purity that was the guiding principle of German identity. For romantics like Schlegel, adherence to the idea of a German-led modern culture fusing the ancient, medieval and modern, as well as the German, Roman and Christian, lay deep in the nationalist construction of historical consciousness.54 Within such ideas of a ‘natural’ and continuous German nation, language was tied to cultural markers, often grounded in peasant culture. Romantic thinkers idealized the natural strength of the peasants, seeing it as a creative force that could be tapped to forge a new social order from within. This stimulated the collection of songs and folk and fairy tales, and it is no accident that the Brothers Grimm’s hugely significant collection Kinder- und Haus-Märchen (Nursery and Household Tales) was published in this period. The Grimms were strong advocates of German unification as well as disciples of the Enlightenment anthropologist Johann Herder’s ideas of the importance of the Volkspoesie (‘natural’ poetry) of the peasantry. Crucially for us, within the stories they collected and reworked, Gypsies were habitually depicted as witches, thieves or devils, with the children described as ‘ugly’ or ‘dirty’. Even their positive images of Gypsies centred around stories of their magical powers as fortune tellers or sorceresses.55 Early then, in the project of German nationalism, Gypsies were constructed as not simply outside the nation, but as outside humanity itself.
The very artificial nature of the constructed idea of ‘modern Germany’ meant that perhaps more than elsewhere in Europe, the fraught relationship between growing national identity, increased state ambitions and emerging powers of regulation and control, can be seen in the German states. These, by the middle decades of the century, were struggling to give political and administrative form to nationalist ambitions. And this was given impetus by the socio-economic changes affecting the region, as from the 1830s Germany experienced growing industrialization and population growth. In the rural areas, and with agriculture still based on a pre-industrial economy, this led to food riots, rural unemployment and increasing migration, not simply to the towns, but often with those from the Balkans, across the Atlantic.56 Consequently, with the emergence of a new middle class there was also increased pauperism as well as a significant migrant population and political turmoil.
More so even than in France, local political identities remained bound up with the historic states, not simply larger ones such as Bavaria and Hannover, but minor principalities like Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. These continued to compete with articulations of a broader Germanness which, it was argued, now needed to be expressed through political, as well as cultural unity, so that Germans could take their proper place in Europe. Although the German Confederation had a federal assembly and was pledged to mutual defence, it was in fact the Prussian Customs Union, or Zollverein, in which from its formation in 1818 we might see the first steps towards political unity. Driven by the growing economic power of Prussia, the removal of customs duties enabled a freer flow of goods and people, while also being seen as an essential move towards nationhood:
The 830 toll barriers in Germany cripple domestic traffic and bring more or less the same results: what if every limb of the human body were bound together, so that blood could not flow from one limb to the other? In order to trade from Hamburg to Austria, from Berlin to the Swiss Cantons, one must cut through the statutes of ten states, study ten tolls and toll barriers, ten times go through the toll barriers, and ten times pay the tolls. Who but the unfortunate has to negotiate such borders? To live with such borders? Where three or four states collide, there one must live his whole life under evil, senseless tolls and toll restrictions. That is no Fatherland!57
At the same time as these broad-scale developments were taking place, individual states began working more closely, creating bilateral agreements on a range of matters. One issue to which states gave attention was that of cross-border vagrancy, something which, in the early modern period, as we have seen, caused officials repeated difficulties. Hesse and Prussia’s agreement of 1819 ended the practice of evicting vagabonds and criminals across their borders; instead they were to be transported and delivered directly to the police station in the relevant location. Single vagabonds could travel alone, but only with authorized papers outlining a designated travel route, and unless from the same family, they were to travel in groups no larger than three.58 Records from two years later show that the authorities were putting some effort into monitoring and controlling the movement of Gypsies across Hesse. Following reports that groups had entered the province – trading particularly in fine tin-glazed pottery – the police coordinated raids on their camps. They found that several families were being accompanied by people without the proper papers and by ‘suspicious vagrants’ and others involved in ‘aggressive begging’. Such ‘guilty families’ were issued with restrictive travel passes that were valid only i
n certain administrative districts. These passes also specified that families had to travel singly on their routes, with no moving in larger bands permitted.59
Such focus on Gypsies was part of a wider change in attitudes towards migrants and outsiders. The North German Confederation abolished controls on migration in 1867, yet there was still disquiet over the movement of certain groups across internal borders. In this they faced what was to become a persistent dilemma for states: how to allow the free movement of ‘desirable’ goods and persons, while restricting the ‘undesirable’. It is important not to underestimate the diversity of Germany in 1871: differences within and between states ensured that although we can often speak of broad trends we need to be wary of generalizing national mood or opinion.60 And so the presence of different minority groups held different meanings in different parts of the empire. Prussia, for example – as the state most directly concerned both by the nationality struggle and by immigration from the east – actively pursued a restrictive policy towards Poles and Jews, which was aimed at minimizing the perceived threat of the ‘Slavic influx’ prompted by rapid industrialization and the promise of work. In contrast, the Ruhr region actively recruited Poles to its mines and factories.61 To these growing numbers of migrant workers from the late 1860s were the very visible groups of Kalderashi and other Balkan Gypsies, prompting a great deal of popular comment across Germany. The police responded rapidly with circulars aimed at keeping out, or moving on these ‘foreign’ Gypsies, with Prussia in 1868 legalizing their deportation.62
Showing how German Gypsies were increasingly bound up with the issue of foreigners, it was not simply foreign Gypsies who attracted attention: in Baden in 1855 a decree stated how ‘Gypsies, especially from Alsace, have frequently been entering again and roaming about with their families, purportedly to trade, but most for the purposes of begging or other illicit pursuits’.63 Although often visibly different to the Gypsy populations of Germany, the growing popular literature on Gypsies which had begun with Grellmann consistently reinforced the idea of even German Gypsies being a ‘foreign race’, implying that wherever they were they were ‘outsiders’. Evidence from Bavaria in particular reveals that the low-ranking police there struggled with ‘the restriction of the Gypsy label to aliens’.64
The issue of identity became more important as it became tied to states’ desires to control migration, particularly immigration. In turn this was tied to the principle of Heimatrecht, the right of a citizen to settle in a municipality, or return to that municipality, a right that was tied to the ability to claim poor relief.65 Even Gypsy groups, if they were deemed to be local, had rights to this relief, and it was taken seriously. This period saw states codifying their citizenship qualifications, such as Prussia’s Citizenship Law of 1842, which stated that all legitimate children born in Prussia became Prussian citizens. However, it was also the case that the implications for not belonging were made starker, as the consequence of not choosing Prussian citizenship was expulsion.66
Already we have seen how nationalism might be articulated in different ways – in Bulgaria the Orthodox Church was central to ideas of belonging; in Germany language was a key marker – but as the nineteenth century went on ideas of ‘race’, which while having received the intermittent attention of European thinkers since the late medieval period, gained increasing prominence. Finding articulation in the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races (1855), the following decades saw the emergence of a scholastic field intent on explaining and justifying inequalities between nations, within societies and even between individuals. De Gobineau’s work was premised upon the idea of the superiority of an ‘Aryan race’, with other European ‘races’ and non-Europeans placed within a descending racial hierarchy. Used to explain and justify European colonial expansion as much as the stark inequalities of industrializing societies, what became known as social Darwinism – on the grounds of its crude use of and tenuous links to Darwin’s ideas of the ‘survival of the fittest’ – became a way of articulating the superiority of ‘the Teutonic race’ over ‘Slavs’, Jews and Gypsies. This theoretical approach went hand in hand with the rise of physical anthropology, which aimed to distinguish between groups through the ‘hard’ manifestations of ethnicity – skin pigmentation, cranium size and shape and so on – while also feeding into the emerging discipline of criminology. Key here was Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (1876), which was heavily based on racialized categorizations, claiming that certain races, such as Gypsies, were heavily predisposed to crime. His ideas were highly influential and found favour right across Europe and North America. The Spanish anthropologist Rafael Salillas, for example, consequently felt qualified to assert that, ‘Gypsies by nature and occupation are more akin to the delinquent than the normal element of society.’67 Now the centuries-old mistrust of Gypsies and presumptions of illegality could find a pseudo-scientific cloak.
Such preoccupations with ‘race’ were not simply confined to academic or elite circles, but were to become directly translated into how Gypsies, migrants and outsiders were treated and recorded by the police. While having roots reaching back at least to the late seventeenth century, part of this response was the growing professionalization of bureaucracies in general and police forces in particular. And it is here, rather than in schemes specifically directed at Gypsies, that we most often get a glimpse of how German states thought of, and dealt with, Gypsies. From the eighteenth century, Steckbriefe, the police journals containing the details of wanted criminals, demonstrate how simply being an itinerant ‘could be sufficient to be deemed dangerous’ and potentially criminal.68 From the 1750s these had become more systematic, and prompted by the enthusiasm of Enlightenment-inspired civil servants such as Georg Jakob Schäffer of Württemberg, began to be shared across different cities and regions. Demonstrating clearly the links between improved administration, increased regulation and territorial unification, these administrators were motivated by a desire to create a more efficient cross-border unitary police system in which, initially at least, south German and Swiss states could work together. They saw a direct relationship between the fight against criminality, a thorough reform of government and ultimately increased national unity. Such attempts by individual police forces, and indeed individual officers, to coordinate their activities is one small example of the many administrative processes necessary to support the political construction of a unified German state.
The journals, crucially, not only demonstrate the police’s desire to be more effective, but they also chart their shifting focus from ‘bandits’ in the eighteenth century to ‘harmful tramps’ by the 1840s and to ‘Gypsies’ by the 1880s. In the 1840s three-quarters of those recorded were labourers, travelling journeymen, servants and people such as waiters and hairdressers. Over half of the people listed in the books were wanted for begging, vagrancy or simply having no clear identity. Yet, if we look at Hannover as an example, an analysis of the entries from police journals from 1846 to 1870 shows an increasing presence of the label Zigeuner (Gypsy) in the classification of travelling people. And what is perhaps most interesting is that it seems a clear case of a change in definition rather than a change in people. The Schwarz and Trollmann families in this period consistently attracted the attention of the police, as they were not from Hannover and failed to produce the correct permits to carry out their itinerant professions. This interest led to an article in one of the journals calling for the police to construct genealogical trees in order to discover their real Heimat to where they could be returned and forced to adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Over the following six years a number of such pedigrees were published for some Gypsy families including the Trollmanns. Up to 1857 they were still included in the categorization ‘harmful tramps’ and it was only after this date, when the police had included the new category of Zigeuner in their records, that they were recorded under this heading. This suggests that it was not that there was an increase in the number of Gypsies in the s
tate, but rather that the definition of certain people as ‘Gypsies’ had become more important to the authorities. And crucially, as time went on, these genealogies became more regularly circulated between different police authorities.69
By the 1880s, pronouncements issued by Bismarck against ‘the mischief caused by bands of Gypsies travelling about in the Reich and their increasing molestation of the population’ suggested that they had become an important target of state attention. The solution proposed was that police were to stop them at national borders, and they were to be sent back if they were ‘unable to account for their crossing, if they carry irregular papers, or if they don’t possess financial resources’. Overall the police were to adopt a policy of strengste Handhabung (the strictest handling) of Gypsies, so that they could be prosecuted for vagrancy if they could prove they had the resources to support themselves but had inadequate travel permits. In part this was based on the expectation that ‘a conviction is to be expected due to the fact that a legal acquisition of the goods and decent lifestyle is highly doubtful’. These measures were not specifically confined to a racial understanding of Gypsies, as they were to apply also to all ‘people travelling in a Gypsy manner’.70
Overall, in Germany then, as in France, we see the growing importance of the idea of ‘the Gypsy’, with their presumed foreignness – always a key theme in settled society’s conception of them – now becoming bound more closely with the idea of the nation state and control of movement. Both the shift in importance of the category Zigeuner and the involvement of the police in tracking their genealogies were to be important precursors to the activities of first the Bavarian police bureau, and later the entire German police force in the first half of the twentieth century.
This flags up the importance of understanding the relationship between the growth of the nation state – sometimes, but not always, tied to ideas of nationalism – and the broader trend of state expansion and social change seen across the nineteenth century. It would be a mistake to suggest that the entire focus of regulation and attention on Gypsies was based around notions of nationalism and of race, important though these were. Centred particularly on Britain and France were growing notions of respectability that became intimately entwined with movements for reform, regulation and social control.