Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers by Becky Taylor

Author:Becky Taylor [Taylor, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780232973
Google: sgowBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00PIOPF12
Goodreads: 23095862
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Into the Flames

THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is rightly thought of as a crucial period in the history of the Gypsies. Since their arrival in Europe they had faced persecution, attacks on their culture, language and lifestyles and yet this period saw something different. Although not necessarily exhibiting new attitudes – for they had long been seen as outside of society and sometimes even outside the human race – what was different was the capacity of states to carry out their intentions. Incidents such as the Spanish ‘round-up’ of 1749 showed that early modern states could exhibit determined action although, as we have seen, this was the exception rather than the rule: more often governments had to rely on the power of intermittent brutality to control their subjects. What we have already seen emerging in the nineteenth century, and what was to become such a feature of the twentieth, were new technologies of rule. Seemingly low key and sometimes apparently even benign, the expansion of the functions of the state created a different world in which rules and by-laws seemingly took the place of ‘Gypsy hunts’, the scaffold and banishment. Regulations covering public health, education, environmental control and the use of particular spaces meant that Europe saw the expansion of state action in ever-widening areas of people’s everyday lives. Inevitably such regulations did not simply affect the settled population, but rather spilled over into, and indeed sometimes were directly aimed at, the treatment of Gypsies. And as the capacity of states to act expanded, so too did their ambitions: liberal democracies, as much as either Marxism or fascism, had a clear idea of what the ideal citizen might consist of and enacted measures to try and promote their vision.

Therefore, although the Holocaust hangs heavy over this period, when we think of the death camps, internment camps and genocide, it is perhaps most helpful to think of them as one particular manifestation of modernity rather than simply either as a horrific aberration or the culmination of centuries of persecution. Doing this enables us to see the Roma Holocaust as one of a number of manifestations of deeply engrained prejudices against Roma, Sinti and other Gypsies groups at a particular moment in history.1 Consequently it also helps us to understand how it was that this prejudice might find other expressions at different places and times. Rather than detracting from the deep significance of the Holocaust, it means we can understand the multitude of ways in which Gypsies faced and experienced persecution, harassment and marginalization within modern Europe.

It is useful then to begin by seeing how the extension of regulation more broadly affected Gypsies in the first decades of the century. As we might expect, the diversity we have seen in Gypsies’ living patterns across Europe, in which they took on a wide range of occupations, though often, but not exclusively, at the lower end of the social scale, can similarly be seen in their experiences of education. From the 1870s,

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