Gypsies, German Identity, and Heimat in Hebbel, Raabe, Keller, and Strauss

Despite their professed anti-Romanticism, despite the realistic aspirations fulfilled elsewhere in their œuvre , indeed despite the more or less secure ethnic identity of their Gypsy figures, one looked in vain for an authentic encounter with Romany culture in Storm and Stifter. Some of the features foregrounded in the contemporary anthropological report and literary image are of course authentic. Gypsies without doubt did, as Storm and Stifter fleetingly hint, and as Mörike’s Friedrich Nolten and Franz Liszt in person observed, travel at their own pleasure, nomadically, in large bands, through forest and plain, on foot and in horse-drawn covered wagons, plying their marginal trades by day in the gadjo contact zone, hunting lower varieties of game, and congregating of an evening around the camp fire, where they would smoke their beloved tobacco, drink spirits, tell their ancient tales, play their stirring improvised music, and perform their traditional dances. That said, significant dimensions of the reality of Gypsy life form no part of the cognitive interest of writers in this strand of the literary tradition. What, then, was life really like for a Gypsy in mid-nineteenth-century Germany?