Stations in Gypsy Cultural Anthropology from Jacob Thomasius to Liszt

Even that most generous, relativist, and cosmopolitan of German Enlightenment anthropologists, Johann Gottfried Herder, wanted to put them in the army. The 700,000 or 800,000 Gypsies present in Europe, he wrote in his Ideen (1794), were a strange, heathen, subterranean nation, alienated by birth from everything godly, decent and bürgerlich , committed even after centuries to this demeaning destiny, and thus good for nothing but a dose of military discipline. 1 In his brief adversion Herder encapsulates the fascination and frustration which, since their appearance in Europe in the twelfth century (and Germany in the early fifteenth), the Romany nation has retained for the occidental and especially the German mind. The strange charisma of the Romanies plainly attracts Herder’s philanthropic gaze. But their complete indifference to the heritage of German Enlightenment humanist values incites even in Herder’s most elastic of minds something close to contempt and far from understanding, and invites from this most tolerant of spirits something equally close to punishment and far from justice. There is no direct link between the exemplary humanist Herder and the criminal racial hygienists who later formulated the ideology of National Socialism. And yet even Herder, with the failure of understanding and elusive hostility to the Romany presence typical of his age, represents a chapter in the long story of Germanic anti-Gypsyism which reached an unspeakable nadir in the Porrajmos 2 or Romany Holocaust under National Socialism. In that inferno from 500,000 to 750,000 Gypsies are estimated to have been murdered. Despite official gestures to the contrary, anti-Gypsyism still dominates popular attitudes in German-speaking lands. 3