Josef Fenneker Carme
1918, poster for the film by Ernst Lubitsch Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum Audio sequence: Kathleen Haaversen, The Habanera from "Carmen"
Racial investigations at the Racial-hygienic Research Unit of the Reich's Public Health Bureau, Berlin, worker holding a table of eye colors next to a gypsy, 1940-1942 Berlin, Bundesarchiv, Aussenstelle Berlin-Zehlendorf
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These are the thumbnails and texts for this alcove.
They can be printed.
For a long time, the lifestyle and culture of gypsies have been seen as the counter-model of a bourgeois existence. Gypsies conjure up wishful and fearful fantasies that can be cristallized in symbolical places:
The Stage
Countless bourgeois desires are projected onto the stage. The gypsy stands for a free-spirited person without a fixed abode, a sentimental fiddler, a beautiful, fiery woman with black hair and a red dress. Since the beginning of the 19th century these figures have played out our own romantic dreams and longings for escape.
The Street
Gypsies came to Europe in the wake of the Great Migration at the end of the Middle Ages. The many prohibitions on settlement forced them to take up "nomadic professions". They became pot-menders, horse-traders or soothsayers in order to earn a living. More settled citizens saw the street as the gypsies' home, a place of never-ending freedom, but also of vagrant and unregulated life.
The Pillory
In the 15th century, gypsies were declared outlaws and therefore could be persecuted without fear of retribution. Citizens believed that these swarthy people, with their thieving transactions and licentious sexuality, had no morals. Since that time, the stereotype of the lawless gypsy has taken hold. It reached its sinister culmination in the Third Reich.
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