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"Gypsies" and Jews in post 1945 Literature

The "Gypsy" and the Jew are figures on which we commonly project the character of the "other” or the misunderstood "stranger” within a society. The characteristics attributed to them are stylised into the typical characteristics of their people as a whole.

Depictions of "Gypsies"

The racy Carmen, colourful gypsy caravans, wild gypsy music, the sinister fortune-teller, the thief or the work-shy vagabond – all those are examples of traditional typifications of "Gypsies” in literature and other art forms, which are hardly questioned - even today.

Gypsy boys from Ceuas. Most of the residents of this tiny village play music.
Photo: AP

Reduced to the function of heightening tension and driving the narrative forward, they have been regular characters in popular literature (myths, fairytales, ballads, thrillers and adventure novels) since the 18th century. In addition to the classic treatments of the Gypsy theme, the vagabonding stranger used to serve merely as a marginal figure in front of an exotic backdrop. After 1945, however, he was sometimes employed as the protagonist at the centre of events.

For decades, stories featuring prejudged narratives of "Gypsies" from all over the world have been enjoying an uninterrupted boom. Some of those stories were even included in schoolbooks, such as Wolfdietrich Schnurre's short story "Jenö war mein Freund” (Jenö was my friend)(1958). This classic piece of youth literature became caught in a cross-fire of criticism, as Schnurre continues to uphold the positive and negative clichés of the sly and stealing gypsy boy in the character of Jenö – although with well-meaning intentions he ends his story with a deportation, alluding to the holocaust of the Sinti and Roma people.

Schnurre's work tells the story of a friendship between the adolescent first-person narrator and the gypsy boy Jenö, whose "people dwell in their caravans" and who are "incredibly shabby” like the Grandmother. The actual hero of the story is the narrator's beloved Father. Although his prejudices are confirmed, the Father does not bemoan the fact that he is missing a barometer and soon many more other items after Jenö's visits. Through his contact to Jenö, the Father only exchanges his initial "Gypsy-phobe attitude for a "Gypsy-phile” one, which, however, makes the whole "otherness” and "strangeness” that Schurre describes difficult to understand. The behaviour of the Gypsy boy who eats hedgehogs and steals children's toys is excused with "other customs”, but the boy remains reduced to his strangeness and is denied his own personal dynamic. Schnurre also displays a lack of reflection and problem-awareness in letting his Gypsy boy speak thieves' argot, a cant dating back to the Middle Ages, instead of Romanes. This makes Jenö a descendent of the so-called Yenish people, so Schnurre made a mistake by making him a member of the Sinti and Roma ethnic group.

The critical reception of stories like this one did nothing to derogate the stereotypical depictions of Gypsies. In the book "In meiner Sprache gibt es kein Wort für morgen (There's No Word for Tomorrow in My Language)”, published in 1990, for example, author Elisabeth Petersen combines the persistent myths of an untroubled Gypsy life and a compulsive mobility for example, with the allegation that Sinti – like children – exclusively live in the here and now, which is why they do not even have a "word for tomorrow”. These myths are actually incompatible with the reality of Sinti and Roma people

Depictions of Jews

In contrast to the figure of the "Gypsy”, whose wealth of depictions has remained unchanged in post-1945 literature, some new Jewish stereotypes have come up after the holocaust alongside the old ones, which include the "beautiful Jewish woman” and the "unscrupulous and miserly Jew”.

First of all, there were not many literary depictions of Jews after 1945. Although one new aspect that has emerged is the reduction of the Jew to an unprotected and defenceless victim. A good example of this is Bruno Apitz's novel "Nackt unter Wölfen” (Naked Among the Wolves) (1958). The hero of the novel is a small Jewish boy, who is smuggled from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where he is hidden and saved by Communist inmates. Focussing on a child's fate is a trusted plot device; it "belittles” the horror and the reader's sympathy and identification seem certain. The central theme of the story, which pushes its way into the reader's mind, is not the degree of the annihilation, but the fact a child is made to suffer.

It is more difficult to judge the work of Alfred Andersch. Like no other post-war author, he has made Jewish figures an issue. In his novel "Efraim” (1967), his first-person narrator is a German-Jewish intellectual who is affected by his early exile and the murder of his parents in Auschwitz. He comes to Berlin to look for his childhood sweetheart, Esther. While in the beginning Efraim is convinced of Esther's death, he eventually has reason to believe that she survived living with nuns. On the one hand, Andersch's Jewish character displays a tendency to trivialise events – as a Jewish figure, Efraim is allowed to argue the randomness of the holocaust; his book also shows a fascination with the questionable connection between "Kitsch und Tod (kitsch and death)” (Saul Friedländer). On the other hand, he evokes the legendary anti-Semitic figure of the "eternal Jew”, in order to mark the latter's mythical fate as an outdated counter-concept to the sophisticated design of his own very vivid first-person narrator.

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