Zigeunerromantik, Gypsy Others, and Fake Gypsies in German Literature from Wolzogen to Immermann

Scarcely had Heinrich Grellmann made the Gypsies present in the German public mind than they became almost omnipresent in German literature. The literary Gypsy can be found in more or less prominent roles in major works of high or popular literature from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), Caroline von Wolzogen’s Die Zigeuner (1802), and August Klingemann’s Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (1805–06), to Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810), August von Kotzebue’s Die kleine Zigeunerin (1810), Arnim’s Isabella von Ägypten (1812), Clemens Brentano’s Die mehrerern Wehmüller (1817), and Hoffmann’s Kater Murr (1821–22), to Pius Alexander Wolff’s Preciosa (1820), Eduard Mörike’s Maler Nolten (1832), and Karl Immermann’s Die Epigonen (1835–36) — and innumerable others in all genres. In the case of Arnim and Brentano, the frequency, prominence, and significance of Gypsy figures in their entire œuvre suggest that these two leading late Romantic authors were, for a time, little short of obsessive self-identification with the Romany nation. 1 But it is also clear that the fascination of the Gypsy phenomenon extended for the German literary mind of that age well beyond the compass of the Romantic movement. Now in recent years the phenomenon of the Gypsy in German literature around 1800, long neglected by scholarship, 2 has received a good deal of attention, almost all of it devoted to Zigeunerromantik , and hence prior to our cognitive interest. 3 But it is from the age of Zigeunerromantik and other German representations of the Gypsy around 1800 that the literary representation of the Gypsy in German literature until the First World War develops, and against which it reacts. This chapter therefore offers a concise survey and evaluation of the Gypsy presence in key works around 1800. In Chapter 1 we saw that unsympathetic, Orientalist appropriation of the Romany voice by the master narrative of the gadjo host was the defining characteristic of Gypsy anthropology after Grellmann in the first half of the nineteenth century. Here it will become evident that the literary representation of the Gypsy can be seen as accompanying that phenomenon in a number of complex ways. Chief amongst them, as will be seen, is a shift in focus from pseudo-Gypsies to genuine Gypsies.