Saar, Alscher, and the Beginning of the End

In this concluding chapter the liberal Austrian aristocrat Ferdinand von Saar (1833–1906) and the Banat (Rumanian-) German writer Otto Alscher (1877–1944) can stand despite their contrasting perspectives for the fundamental trends in Germanophone representation of the Gypsy. Either side of 1900, as the First World War brought the nineteenth century to its retarded close, two linked shifts occur: the post-Darwinian Social Darwinist racial paradigm grows to dominate the presence of Gypsy culture in literature and anthropology, and the long epochal trend to the aesthetic recuperation of the Gypsy, after its last hurrah in the work of Carl Hauptmann, fades. Let us take Saar first.