In the late nineteenth century, a new generation of scholars, many from Hungary's German minorities in Transylvania and the Banat, focused on what they identified as Zigeuner culture.Footnote 1 This interest coincided with strong Magyarization pressures on minorities. Following the 1867 Ausgleich, in which Hungary absorbed Transylvania and became autonomous within the Habsburg Empire, Magyar nationalists elided Hungarian citizenship with Magyar ethnicity in their pursuit of a modern, unitary nation-state. Liberal reform threatened Transylvanian Saxon corporate privileges, while Magyarization offered historically unprivileged Banat Schwabs opportunities for social advancement. Consequently, German responses to Magyarization were divided. Whereas some Germans embraced Magyarization, others competed with the Hungarian modernizing project by asserting their own German nationalist civilizing mission in East Europe. Still other individuals, indifferent to nationalism, identified with prenational collectives such as estate, religion, and locality. Hungarian and German elites alike placed themselves at the apex of an ethnic hierarchy ordered by level of “civilization,” thereby legitimizing participation in public life. Simultaneously, they castigated Zigeuner and other subaltern cultures as primitive Naturvölker, denying those interpolated the right of reply.Footnote 2 Both Magyar and German elites perceived Zigeuner as threatening public order and the general good, thus legitimizing reform efforts. By writing about the Zigeuner, scholars therefore either asserted competing Magyar and German models for modernization and reform, or rejected modernization by embracing the romantic image of the Wanderzigeuner (“nomadic Gypsy”).
This article examines three prominent Hungarian-German scholars: the historian Johann Schwicker (1839–1902), the ethnographer Anton Herrmann (1851–1926), and the folklorist Heinrich von Wlislocki (1856–1907). Whereas Schwicker, a passionate German nationalist, asserted a German mission to civilize Hungary itself, Herrmann willingly embraced Hungarian nationalism. Wlislocki, for his part, rejected all nationalist modernizing efforts as a threat to his romantic visions of Transylvania's vanishing past. These three scholars collectively illustrate the range of Hungarian-German responses to nationalist modernization. All three also played leading roles in the study of Transylvanian and Hungarian Zigeuner. Historians have explored how Hungarian-German scholars reinforced the European image of the Zigeuner as an uncultured, Oriental Naturvolk, alternately symbolizing romantic freedom or desperately needing reform.Footnote 3 Few consider these descriptions as responses to the demands of the Hungarian state, however. The exception, Marian Zăloagă’s examination of how Hungarian-German nationalists used the Zigeuner to assert their culture's alleged superiority over Hungarian nationalism, has been of great assistance in writing this article.Footnote 4 Certainly, Schwicker called for the Zigeuner to assimilate into Hungarian and Romanian culture, arguing that Germanization was beyond their reach, thereby asserting German culture's alleged superior status as the culture of the educated elite. Conversely, however, Herrmann urged the Magyarization of the Zigeuner to strengthen the Hungarian nation-state and denigrate the role of German and Romanian culture. Finally, Wlislocki presented the Zigeuner as the romantic symbol of the premodern age, and as a critique of the modernizing projects he opposed. Whatever their differences, Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki all underline the role of national disputes in shaping Zigeunerkunde (“Gypsy Studies”).
The first part of this article examines German responses to Magyarization, outlining the Hungarian modernizing project and the demands it made of Hungarian Germans. It then considers the responses made by Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Schwabs at the communal level, before examining Schwicker's, Herrmann's, and Wlislocki's individual responses. Communal attitudes did not dictate individual responses but did determine what institutions scholars could draw upon to support their views. The second part of this article focuses on the impact of nationalist modernizing projects in Zigeunerkunde, outlining first the Romani population of Hungary, then their social marginalization, and, finally, increasing state efforts at surveillance and control, which, in turn, motivated growing scholarly interest in the Zigeuner. Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki were inconsistent regarding which Zigeuner they described, but tended to focus on Transylvania and the Banat, where Zigeuner culture was considered most “pure” (and therefore most problematic for Hungary's continuing development). The following analysis of the Roma therefore also focuses on the regions of eastern Hungary. It then examines, in turn, Schwicker's, Herrmann's, and Wlislocki's discursive deployment of the term Zigeuner in support of their views on modernization, which shaped Zigeunerkunde in Hungary. Collectively, their representations discredited attempts by Roma to integrate into mainstream society, marking them as insufficiently “civilized,” while simultaneously denying authenticity to all but a vanishingly small fraction who supposedly met an impossible ideal. Consequently, by the outbreak of World War I, Hungarian-German scholars increasingly viewed the Zigeuner as irredeemable and “dying out.” The article concludes with an analysis of how the function of the Zigeuner stereotype changed after World War I, when Romanianization replaced Magyarization in former eastern Hungary. Considered incorrigibly “Oriental,” Zigeuner no longer stood as a discursive subject of reform, but rather as one of the last symbols of an increasingly fragile German social mastery.
Magyar Nationalism and the Hungarian Modernizing Project
Under the 1867 Ausgleich, those in Hungary who spoke Hungarian as a first language constituted less than half of the population of Hungary: 46.6 percent in 1880, which rose to 51.4 percent in 1900 and 54.5 percent in 1910. (Even this narrow majority was achieved only by excluding semiautonomous Croatia-Slavonia from the census figures.Footnote 5 ) Other widely spoken mother tongues were Romanian (17.5 percent in 1880, falling to 16.1 percent in 1910), Slovak (13.5 percent in 1880, 10.7 percent in 1910), and German (13.6 percent in 1880, 10.4 percent in 1910).Footnote 6 Conversely, Roma (classed ethnically rather than linguistically) constituted approximately 1.6 percent of the population in 1893.Footnote 7 These demographics provoked considerable anxiety for Magyar nationalists.
Late eighteenth-century Hungarian nationalists had hoped to transform the estate-based natio Hungarica of the nobility into a modernized Hungarian nation unified by shared institutions, rather than shared language. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, nationalists increasingly embraced a specifically Magyarist conception of Hungarian nationalism, linking the Hungarian nation with the Hungarian language and advocating the assimilation of non-Magyars. Simultaneously, Magyar nationalists laid claim to the non-Hungarian speakers in Hungary. Unlike German, which draws (inconsistent) distinctions between Ungar (Hungarian; an inhabitant of Hungary) and Magyar (Magyar; a speaker of Hungarian), the Hungarian language uses Magyar for both.Footnote 8 This lack of distinction aided Magyar nationalists in arguing that all citizens of the country were members of the Magyar politikai nemzet (Hungarian political nation). As such, however, all citizens were to consider themselves Hungarians (Magyarok) and speak Hungarian. The nation thus simultaneously included all inhabitants and was specifically Magyar. For Magyar nationalists, this contradictory position legitimized Magyarization—a necessity if the state was to be based on an ethnolinguistic nation.Footnote 9
Magyarization was closely bound up with modernization. Most national activists in the Habsburg Empire considered their movement to be the agent of progressive reform.Footnote 10 Magyar nationalists believed the Ausgleich had finally freed Hungary from Austrian colonization, enabling it to fulfill its destiny as a modern European state. Magyar nationalist parliamentarians sought to create a French-style, monolingual, liberal nation-state by introducing universal laws and a common state language. Liberal nationalist politician Belá Grünwald (1839–1891) claimed, for example, that Hungarian non-Magyars were incapable of independent advancement; it was the destiny of Magyardom to assimilate them, thereby elevating them to a “civilized” status.Footnote 11
During the 1848 Revolution, some German speakers in the Danube basin had asserted a dual “Hungaro-German” identity, distinguishing between Hungarian and Magyar.Footnote 12 Yet, Magyarization pressures hindered cooperation with Magyar nationalists, especially after the Ausgleich. Before the 1870s, liberal Magyar nationalist leaders softened their demands in order to avoid alienating non-Magyar nationalists. The 1868 Nationalities Law granted extensive minority language rights in education, religious worship, local administration, and the courts. The law nonetheless recognized minorities only with regard to linguistic matters: the nationalities were given no recognition as “political nations.” Furthermore, the Nationalities Law was increasingly breeched from the 1870s. The Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, who governed from 1875 to1890, pursued the full Magyarization of public life, simultaneously limiting non-Magyar political and cultural development. Tisza considered Magyarization necessary for Hungarian national survival. Magyar nationalists increasingly emphasized the importance of Hungarian as a mother tongue, thus excluding non-Magyars from membership of the nation; they considered minorities’ demands for continued linguistic rights as latent separatism at best, and, at worst, outright treason. Education laws imposed increasing Hungarian language education from kindergarten to secondary school, and the number of minority language schools declined sharply as a result.Footnote 13
German Responses to Magyarization
Responses to Magyarization of the two principal German communities in eastern Hungary, the Banat Schwabs and the Transylvanian Saxons, differed greatly, which reflected the different origins and structures of their communities. The Transylvanian Saxons originated in twelfth-century migration from the Holy Roman Empire at the invitation of Hungarian monarchs, who offered them land and various privileges. They formed a compact settlement of merchants, artisans, and landowning yeomanry constituting a privileged estate, the natio Saxones, and dominated the Lutheran Church of Transylvania following the Reformation. Estate and faith reinforced linguistic divisions in Transylvania: whereas German speakers dominated the Saxon estate and Lutheran Church, Hungarian speakers predominated among the nobility and other Protestant and Catholic sects; most peasants, by contrast, were Romanian speakers belonging to Eastern Rite sects. Socioeconomic stratification survived the abolition of the estate in 1874. Banat Schwabs originated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settlement following the gradual Habsburg reconquest of Hungary from Ottoman rule in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Scattered among Romanian and Magyar settlers in mostly agrarian communities, Schwabs held few privileges. Furthermore, they belonged to the predominantly Hungarian-speaking Catholic Church and had no independent religious structures.Footnote 14
For the emerging Schwab middle class, whose members did not have corporate or religious bodies that they could dominate, the Hungarian state and private institutions provided the best means of social advancement. Despite German nationalists’ angry protestations, Magyarization was mostly voluntary. Economic growth provided material incentives to potential middle-class converts to Magyarization. Although Hungary's economy grew rapidly after 1867, it lagged behind that of the Western industrial powers, making Hungary's bureaucracy a disproportionately important means of social mobility. Many members of the German educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) were welcomed into state employment—on condition of their Magyarization. Spreading market economics, with its interrelated processes of migration, social mobility, industrialization, and urbanization, reinforced assimilation.Footnote 15 Middle-class German-speakers in the Banat enthusiastically embraced Hungarian nationalism.Footnote 16
By comparison, even after the abolition of the estates, the Lutheran Church in Transylvania and its extensive German-language school network provided the main vehicle for Saxon nationalism and middle-class advancement. The Church increasingly identified as a specifically Saxon/German Volkskirche, with a national as well as a religious mission.Footnote 17 Pastor and teacher Georg Daniel Teutsch (1817–1893) synthesized the first Saxon nationalist history, arguing that Saxons had brought civilization and culture to the East, that they were defenders of Christianity, and that they were an educated, democratic people in a barbarous land.Footnote 18 Teutsch's views reflected broader Austrian-German claims to cultural superiority and a “civilizing mission” in Eastern Europe, as well as the “myth of the German East” popular in the German Kaiserreich.Footnote 19 This civilizing role directly challenged Magyar nationalist claims to be the principal drivers of modernization in Hungary. As bishop of Transylvania from 1867 to his death, Teutsch influenced the school curriculum and the contents of parish sermons.Footnote 20 The Lutheran schools produced near universal literacy, allowing the German language press to disseminate nationalist ideas widely.Footnote 21 Whereas Teutsch framed Saxon history as a specifically Transylvanian civilizing mission, other Saxon nationalists emphasized their people's cultural and economic contribution to Hungary following the abolition of Transylvanian autonomy in 1867.Footnote 22
Not all German speakers embraced either Magyar or German nationalism, however. Nationalist activists competed fiercely for the loyalties of Habsburg subjects, but the national indifference of the population frequently stymied their efforts. Individuals frequently identified with prenational collectives such as estate, faith, and locality (which cut across ethnolinguistic lines), actively pursued strategies of multilingualism, and resisted attempts to impose national boundaries. German speakers in Hungary were no different in this regard.Footnote 23
Community attitudes did not predetermine individual responses to Magyarization, but they did influence the institutional structures from which German scholars could draw support.Footnote 24 Johann Schwicker, born in Beschenowa (Újbesenyő/Dudeștii Noi) in the Banat, advocated a German civilizing mission in Hungary and passionately defended German-language education. A respected pedagogue and historian, he was dismissed from his position as director of the Buda Teachers’ Seminary after clashing with the Minister of Education over Magyarization. He subsequently had a successful career in the private German-language education system, and served for fifteen years in the Hungarian parliament, mostly representing the (Transylvanian) electorate of Schäßburg (Segesvár/Sighișoara), while favoring German nationalism, conservatism, and loyalty to the House of Habsburg.Footnote 25
Among many other works, Schwicker contributed to Austrian publisher Karl Prochaska's series Die Völker Österreich-Ungarns. Ethnographische und culturhistorische Schilderungen, which was published from 1881 to 1883. The series, which catalogued the principal peoples under Habsburg rule, reflected a modernizing and categorizing tradition dating back to the Enlightenment.Footnote 26 Each volume described a different national community in the empire, and Prochaska commissioned members of the different nationalities to express their own views.Footnote 27 Schwicker, to whom he gave a free hand, wrote Die Deutschen in Ungarn und Siebenbürgen (1881), in which he claimed to have synthesized the first successful history of the German settlements in Hungary and Transylvania as a whole, using the unifying theme of the German civilizing mission extolled by Teutsch and others.Footnote 28 Like other nineteenth-century nationalists, Schwicker identified “heroic deeds” demonstrating his nation's alleged contributions to human civilization, as well as the ills allegedly perpetrated against them by others.Footnote 29 The Germans’ contribution, Schwicker claimed, was their modernizing influence on the Hungarian state: “These Germans have delivered through their work and energy great service to industry, trade, and commerce, to culture and civilization, as well as to the defense of the country with blood and property, and always proved true citizens.”Footnote 30 Schwicker emphasized in particular the influence of German culture on Hungary's elites: “One would have to look at the non-German nationalities of the country to identify nearly half the reading public of German periodicals. But that only testifies yet again to the great significance of the German language and its important role as a political and cultural factor in the country.”Footnote 31 Furthermore, he argued, “Every educated person in the country, regardless of the nationality to which he belongs, speaks and reads German.”Footnote 32 Schwicker thus saw German culture as improving Hungary's educated elite: it was not intended for the uneducated masses. Conversely, Schwicker identified Magyarization as the primary ill perpetrated against Hungary's Germans, arguing that it ignored their loyalty to the state and ran counter to Hungary's interests.Footnote 33 To Schwicker, the civilizing mission thus legitimized German nationalism within Hungary.
By comparison, Anton Herrmann, born and educated in Kronstadt (Brassó/Brașov) in Transylvania, identified strongly with Magyar nationalism. As a reporter for the (Banat Schwab) Banater Post, he actively campaigned to prevent German schools in Hungary from accepting funding from Germany. After studying linguistics and philology in Vienna, Klausenburg (Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca), and Budapest, he taught at Catholic and state schools, simultaneously working in journalism. From 1883, Herrmann taught German language and literature at the Pedagogium teaching seminary in Budapest; in 1898 he was concurrently appointed Privatdocent at the University of Klausenburg, where he lectured in folklore.Footnote 34
Herrmann considered Magyar nationalism the best means of uniting Hungary's ethnic communities. In an essay on Hungarian ethnography, he asserted the Hungarian political nation to be a single, indivisible whole, ethnically diverse, but constructed around an ethnic Magyar core. He argued that the extension of modern civilization in Hungary would cause other ethnic communities to lose their “primitive” cultural peculiarities and grow closer to the core Magyar element. Herrmann characterized Magyarization as a gift to the other ethnicities, arguing that the Magyar people were now sharing their last remaining historical privilege: ownership of the Hungarian language. He praised ethnic German loyalty to the Magyar cause, highlighting their role in counterbalancing separatist movements on the fringes of the kingdom, e.g., Romanian nationalism in Transylvania and the Banat.Footnote 35
Herrmann claimed that familiarity with each other's culture was a precondition for peaceful interethnic relations in Hungary.Footnote 36 In 1889 he founded the Ethnographical Society of Hungary (Magyarországi Néprajzi Társaság), which, under his leadership, included many non-Magyar folklorists, and cofounded the journal Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn (1889–1911), which published studies on all cultures in Hungary. He wrote comparative ethnography himself, and actively encouraged the establishment of Saxon and Romanian folklore museums. Herrmann nonetheless urged the continuing study of other cultures to prevent non-Magyar scholars in neighboring states from distorting their findings to encourage separatism. Rather, he argued, ethnography should reinforce non-Magyar connections to Hungary, undermine separatist movements, and encourage minorities to conform to the Hungarian “specific genius.”Footnote 37 Herrmann may have felt the need to take this stance in order to defend his own position as a loyal Magyar nationalist; he felt obliged to resign from his own Ethnographical Society of Hungary in 1892 when it was renamed the Magyar Ethnographical Society (Magyar Néprajzi Társaság) and adopted a specifically Magyar focus.Footnote 38 Herrmann nonetheless utilized ethnography in the service of Magyarization.
For his part, Heinrich von Wlislocki, who was of mixed Transylvanian Saxon and Galician Polish parentage, highlighted in his work indifference to nationalism, as well as the danger of assuming exclusionary national identities. Schwicker called him “the Pole Dr. Wlislocki,” and Wlislocki himself emphasized his Saxon ancestry when writing on Saxon folklore.Footnote 39 His obituarist Hans Helmolt (1865–1929), by contrast, proclaimed him a German by choice: “It is a comforting fact that the losses we sustain when German families become Slavonic are counterbalanced [by those who become German]…. The German nation as such loses a few members of little value, whereas it gains some of the great men of foreign races. Wlislocki may be considered one of these peaceful conquests.”Footnote 40 Wlislocki studied philology in Klausenburg, where he became a close friend of Herrmann's. He never established a secure career, however, and blamed his failed applications for positions in the civil service and state schools on the preferential employment of Magyars. In desperation, Wlislocki briefly converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism, hoping to secure employment in the Catholic education system. This brief apostasy apparently barred him from the Transylvanian Lutheran Church's German-language school network. “Disciplinary problems” (Historian Martin Ruch suggests alcoholism) also contributed to his difficulties. Wlislocki lived in poverty, often begging for loans from friends and acquaintances, including Herrmann. He found some relief in scholarship, however, and wrote to support himself and his family. For that reason, he was extremely prolific, frequently recycled material, and reissued a number of works in later anthologies.Footnote 41
Like many Habsburg writers, Wlislocki took advantage of the larger publication opportunities the German Kaiserreich offered, which meant that most of his longer works were published in Germany.Footnote 42 He nevertheless rejected both the German civilizing mission and the Hungarian modernization project: a romantic, Wlislocki believed modernity endangered authentic culture.Footnote 43 As he argued in his work on Saxon folk culture: “The time seems to approach with giant strides, when German custom and German tradition … in Transylvania will have disappeared. In hasty pursuit of money and pleasure, strangers inundate the quiet isle of medieval romance, and where once rang out the hunting calls of German knights and the Hallelujahs of pious pilgrims, now roars the steam horse [Dampfross]; this little island of German folk life will soon be submerged in a flooding tumult of peoples.”Footnote 44 He similarly regretted the rapid Magyarization of Transylvanian Armenians.Footnote 45 Wlislocki considered the task of ethnography to record these vanishing cultures before they were lost entirely to modernity.Footnote 46
As the foregoing suggests, Hungarian-German academics took very different positions with regard to German and Hungarian nationalism. Their views of modernization and nationalism also shaped their approaches to Zigeunerkunde, which provided fuel for their debates. The following section examines the position of Roma in Habsburg Hungary and especially Transylvania, then turns to German-language representations of the Zigeuner.
The Roma in Habsburg Hungary
Germans and Roma in Habsburg Hungary shared many similarities. Both first arrived in successive waves of migration. Neither population was internally homogenous. Members of each population had a different legal status, confessed to different faiths, and spoke divergent dialects and/or languages. Neither population constituted a single “imagined community.”Footnote 47 Both groups played important economic roles, especially as artisans. Nonetheless, while many Germans occupied privileged positions, Roma constituted the most socially marginalized population in Hungary.
The latter performed a range of professions: construction, for example, as well as smithing and tinkering, woodworking, cobbling, basket weaving, gold panning, horse breeding, agricultural and industrial labor, petty trade, and folk medicine. The tenfold increase in length of the Hungarian rail network between 1867 and 1910 brought small-scale Romani artisans into increasing competition with mass manufacturers from Western Europe. Domestic manufacturing also grew rapidly in the same period, yet poverty and discrimination, both significant barriers to formal education, largely excluded Romani manufacturers from industrializing, which contributed to their increasing economic marginalization. Much of the economic growth remained centered on Budapest, however; by comparison, Transylvania and the Banat remained relatively underdeveloped, thus affording Romani artisans greater opportunities to continue their traditional crafts in rural areas. Roma also remained popular entertainers, especially as musicians.Footnote 48
Many traditional Romani professions required seasonal mobility, according to the 1893 census, yet the vast majority of Roma lived sedentary lives. A substantial minority (38 percent) lived in poorer quality housing than that of their non-Romani neighbors; this included tents as well as partially subterranean earthen huts. In around half of all settlements in which they were found, Roma were spatially segregated into satellite suburbs. They also owned far less land than the non-Romani population. The most striking markers of Romani disadvantage lay in education, however: only 31 percent of school-age Roma children (six to fourteen) attended school, as opposed to 81 percent of the non-Romani population. Similarly, fewer than ten percent of Romani men and six percent of Romani women were literate, as opposed to 62 percent of men and 53 percent of women in the overall population.Footnote 49
Racialization legitimized the exploitation of poorly paid Romani labor. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most Roma were enserfed and their communities were sedentary or only seasonally mobile. Local knowledge of who was a Zigeuner was sufficient to legitimize his or her marginal position in society without recourse to detailed ethnographical studies or racial theories. Traditional folk representations of the Zigeuner, such as those captured in Josef Haltrich's Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen (1856/1882), legitimized their marginal status. The tales characterized Roma as shiftless Wanderzigeuner, constitutionally unable to farm or retain possession of land. They were cunning yet foolish, lazy, dishonest, irreligious, and prone to alcoholism and petty theft. Zigeuner were frequently the only human character in Saxon animal fables, paradoxically denying their basic humanity.Footnote 50 Both Germans and Hungarians asserted their social mastery over the Roma through such stereotypes. Simultaneously, Zăloagă notes, the Zigeuner served as a boundary marker that contrasted with the traditional Hungarian-German self-image as diligent, thrifty, honest, canny, and skilled workers.Footnote 51
After the Ausgleich, however, the breakdown of traditional social controls on Zigeuner, because of increasing social mobility, provoked considerable anxiety about the “threat” presented by so-called Wanderzigeuner, even though the vast majority of Roma were sedentary.Footnote 52 Several factors, including the abolition of serfdom in Hungary and Transylvania in 1848, the dissolution of the guilds, the expansion of the railway beginning in the 1850s, rapid liberalization of the economy in the decade following 1867, increased inward migration of Roma from the Danube Principalities, and the introduction of universal liberal rights in 1867, all undermined local knowledge of who exactly was a Zigeuner.Footnote 53
These anxieties also reflected broader concerns following the Ausgleich about “vagabondage” (Hung. Csavargás, German Vagabondage). The state introduced new social welfare measures informed by economic liberalization, industrial development, wage labor, and an acceptance of (productive) population mobility. Simultaneously, however, authorities deployed policies of exclusion and suppression to minimize the welfare burden on state institutions, and to enforce conformity with dominant social and economic expectations. The state resolved the contradiction between the illusion of extensive welfare support and continuing poverty by criminalizing public displays of poverty such as “vagabondage” and unlicensed begging. The illusion that any individual could maintain a respectable occupation should he wish to do so discursively maintained this criminalization.Footnote 54
In 1867–1868, parliament criminalized begging in marketplaces and denied travel documents to unemployed or “habitually mobile” Zigeuner, triggering increased police action against Roma. The state also targeted Wanderzigeuner for failing to perform military service or pay taxes. In 1879, further laws were introduced that imposed fines for vagabondage. District sheriffs (Richter, szolgabíró, literally “judge”), who exercised wide-ranging jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters, oversaw local Roma. Punishments remained light, however, and were inconsistently enforced.Footnote 55 Transylvanian Saxon author Erwin Wittstock (1899–1962), reflecting in the 1920s, portrayed the sheriff as a good-natured figure who had attempted to “improve” the Zigeuner.Footnote 56 The sheriff's authority nevertheless depended on the coercive force of the gendarmerie, and sometimes led to sexual exploitation.Footnote 57 Furthermore, there were growing arguments in the late 1880s that punishments were too lenient. Local authorities surveyed in 1893 expressed great anxieties about Wanderzigeuner behavior in particular, compared to more positive views of settled Zigeuner. Municipal bylaws singled out Wanderzigeuner as key elements to be controlled. Such regulations frequently affected Roma who were not “vagabonds,” but who travelled seasonally to pursue a trade.Footnote 58
The changing relationship between state and citizen also increased pressure on Roma. Jennifer Illuzzi argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European bureaucratic “information states” perceived Zigeuner mobility as a threat to public order. They sought to make them “legible” through statistics.Footnote 59 The weakness of civil society in Hungary ensured that the authority of the substantial bureaucratic structure established following the Ausgleich was subject to few checks.Footnote 60 The Ministry of the Interior, concerned that censuses assigning nationality by mother tongue underreported the Zigeuner population (95,500 in 1867, 97,000 in 1880, and 91,603 in 1890), organized special Zigeuner censuses in 1873, 1893, and 1907. These censuses especially strove to produce a complete accounting of the Zigeuner population by labeling sedentary, self-identifying Hungarians or Romanians of Romani origin as Zigeuner.Footnote 61 These censuses consequently identified much larger Zigeuner populations: 214,000 in 1873 and 274,940 in 1893.Footnote 62
Concerns about Magyarization also shaped the state's interest in the Roma. In Transylvania and the Banat, Hungarian speakers declined relative to the local Romanian majority population, which, of course, alarmed Magyar nationalists.Footnote 63 Furthermore, only 12 percent of those who spoke Romanian as their mother tongue also spoke Hungarian—an indication that Magyarization was failing.Footnote 64 The Magyarization of Roma offered a partial counterweight to Romanian influence, however. Hungarian was the mother tongue most commonly spoken by Roma (38 percent across all categories); fewer than half (47.84 percent) could speak Romani as either a first or second language.Footnote 65 The most common mother tongue of Transylvanian Roma was Romani (42 percent), however, followed by Romanian (39 percent); Hungarian came a distant third (19 percent). The large-scale migration of Romani- and Romanian-speaking Roma from the Danube Principalities, following the abolition there of Ţigani (Gypsy) slavery between 1848 and 1856, further diluted Hungarian-speaking Roma. In 1893, one-third of Roma were either migrants or the children of migrants.Footnote 66 Mobility also affected language use: whereas 54 percent of sedentary Roma spoke Hungarian (39 percent spoke it as their mother tongue), only 41 percent of Wanderzigeuner spoke Hungarian (the corresponding figure was 23 percent).Footnote 67
State interest in regulation and reform drew increasing scholarly attention to the Zigeuner. Race reconciled the Rights of Man with the taxonomies of natural science, allowing for the differential allocation of rights.Footnote 68 In 1783 the Jenan scholar Heinrich Grellmann (1755–1804) popularized the theory that the Zigeuner had originated in India, marking them discursively as an Eastern, Oriental Naturvolk, racially other and living the antithesis of respectable, bourgeois life.Footnote 69 Grellmann exercised a powerful influence on Hungarian-German scholars, who often cited him in lieu of conducting fieldwork.Footnote 70 The increasing adoption of detailed ethnographic descriptions, underpinned by racialized definitions of Zigeunertum, allowed the state to single out Zigeuner for special restrictions and controls. Perceived to require policing, reform, and assimilation, the Zigeuner presented a context in which to assert competing models of modernization.
Ethnographers had a particularly free hand because Zigeuner, discursively constructed as non-Europeans, were subject to Orientalist discourses that denied Roma the right of reply. Lorey French, addressing the paucity of published Romani sources in the German-speaking world before the late twentieth century, notes that Roma were truly subaltern: “Subaltern peoples have their voices cut out of the narrative; they do not achieve a dialogic level of utterance. They might speak, but no one in the dominant group listens.”Footnote 71 Prejudice and widespread illiteracy acted as barriers to Romani publications. Ethnographers certainly relied on Romani informants; beginning in 1890–1892, for example, Herrmann gathered much of his music from Berci Eötvős, the leader of a Romani band that played at the spa at Tannendorf (Jegenye/Leghia). Eötvős may also have provided material for Wlislocki, who worked closely with Herrmann at the time.Footnote 72 Scholars rarely acknowledged their informants, however.
The alleged non-European exoticism of the Zigeuner reinforced scholarly interest. In the late nineteenth century, German anthropology was divided between the study of Europeans (Volkskunde) and the study of exotic, primitive peoples from other parts of the world (Völkerkunde).Footnote 73 As “non-Europeans,” the Zigeuner were a subject that allowed scholars to engage in Völkerkunde without leaving Hungary. With the formation in 1888 of the Gypsy Lore Society in Britain, the institutionalization of “Gypsylorism” or “Gypsiology” as a subdiscipline of ethnography reinforced this interest.Footnote 74 Furthermore, Grellmann, drawing heavily on descriptions of Zigeuner customs and traditions made by Pastor Samuel Ab Hortis (1729–1792) of Leutschau (Lőcse/Levoča), elevated Hungarian Roma to the dubious status of the most “authentic” of Zigeuner for allegedly preserving customs “lost” elsewhere.Footnote 75 Gypsy Lore Society founding president Charles Leland (1824–1903) described Hungary as “Gypsy-Land,” “par éminence, the land of the Gypsies,” and home to “several branches of the best type of Romany.”Footnote 76 Travel writers also referred to Hungary as “Gypsy Land.”Footnote 77 Whereas Schwicker resented the association, Herrmann described the Kingdom of Hungary as “the classical land of Zigeunertum [Gypsydom],” and Wlislocki declared the lands of the Danube (Hungary, Transylvania, Romania) to be the only place where one would find “authentic” Zigeuner.Footnote 78 Herrmann, Wlislocki, and respected Romani-language philologist Archduke Joseph Habsburg (1833–1905) were all prominent members of the Gypsy Lore Society.Footnote 79
This new scholarship on the Hungarian Zigeuner was published primarily in German. Although national vernaculars played a growing role in the sciences in the late nineteenth century, German remained, as Schwicker claimed, the shared language of the Austro-Hungarian educated elite.Footnote 80 Furthermore, Wlislocki noted, by publishing in a “global language” (Weltsprache), scholars accessed an international readership unavailable to those writing in Hungarian, “a little read language.”Footnote 81 In addition to the three authors discussed here, scholars in the Habsburg Empire publishing in German on the Zigeuner included individuals identifying as Slovene, Serbian, Czech, Italian, and Hungarian, as well as other Germans from Cisleithania, Transylvania, and the Banat.Footnote 82
Despite growing international institutionalization, there was no formal school of Zigeunerkunde in the Habsburg Empire. The Gesellschaft für Zigeunerforschung, founded in 1903 after a decade-long effort by Anton Herrmann, was short-lived; his journal, Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Ungarn, published Zigeunerkunde scholarship but lacked the institutional structures to establish a clear program for the discipline.Footnote 83 Zigeunerkunde in Hungary conformed to two broad trends in international representations of the Zigeuner: Enlightenment scholarship that, following Grellmann, urged the reform and assimilation of Zigeuner; and romantic scholarship, following British author George Borrow (1803–1881) and Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886), who transformed Grellmann's Orientalist stereotypes into a romantic embodiment of freedom and connection to nature.Footnote 84 Schwicker and Herrmann committed firmly to Enlightened reform, whereas Wlislocki was a passionate romantic. Yet, all three deployed Zigeunerkunde to support or undermine well-defined nationalist arguments asserting competing models of modernization.
Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki reinforced both traditional local representations and broader European stereotypes. They consistently imagined Zigeuner as a primitive vagrant people: “In their wanderings they often show a certain instinctive periodic recurrence, a natural regularity, like the migrations of wandering animals or the orbits of comets.”Footnote 85 They sometimes conceived of Zigeuner as a romantic symbol of freedom and artistry: a “world-forsaking, genuinely romantic folk,” a “wandering people rich in poetry,” whose artistic merit they struggled to reconcile with “their lowly social stage and intellectual inertia, mental laziness as well as often stupid, bestial indifference and insensitivity.”Footnote 86 The three authors ultimately judged this lowly status to be “chiefly the product of the abandonment and neglect in which this people (though mainly of their own will) has so far lived and, in great measure, still lives.”Footnote 87 All three thus treated the Zigeuner as the antithesis of civilization. They nevertheless each used Zigeuner in different ways to express competing views of nationalist modernization.
Johann Heinrich Schwicker
In addition to Die Deutschen in Ungarn, Schwicker authored Die Zigeuner in Ungarn und Siebenbürgen (1883), the final volume in Prochaska's series Die Völker Österreich-Ungarns, which presented Zigeuner as the antithesis to German modernity and civilization. Die Zigeuner in Ungarn was the only volume in the series not written by a member of the community under discussion: Schwicker had not previously published on the Zigeuner and undertook no fieldwork, relying for evidence on Grellmann, Wlislocki, and various travel writers. He perpetuated older stereotypes of the Wanderzigeuner, a group that, to him, included individuals who had lived in the same location for years before moving.Footnote 88 He contrasted Zigeuner customs to bourgeois life.Footnote 89 He also drew on the racial profiling of the German criminologist Richard Liebich, who had described Zigeuner in 1863 as an unchangeable people consisting of morally inferior thieves and frauds.Footnote 90 Schwicker compared Zigeuner to African Hottentots, the most primitive of people in the European imagination.Footnote 91 He attributed Zigeuner “mobility” to a desire to evade police controls (as opposed to avoiding police oppression): “where the authorities were more severe, the sly Zigeuner removed themselves … by emigrating to a neighboring or more distant county in which the authorities were less zealous.”Footnote 92 To Schwicker, Zigeuner were thus not only uncivilized but willfully so.Footnote 93
He dismissed a close analysis of Zigeuner culture as pointless: members of a Naturvolk did not think that deeply about their own traditions.Footnote 94 He only made a concession for Zigeuner musical talent, but nonetheless firmly asserted that Zigeuner musical skills were the product of rote learning, not real education.Footnote 95 Schwicker also believed that Zigeuner had no history: “If history … constitutes above all the continual evolution and development of humanity, or a part thereof, in its cultural achievements, and is acquainted with those achievements, then the Zigeuner indeed have no history; they are an ahistorical, because they have performed no great deeds, and homeless people.”Footnote 96 For Schwicker, Zigeuner history was primarily the history of state control. He praised efforts by eighteenth-century monarchs Maria Theresia (r. 1740–1780) and Joseph II (r. 1765–1790) to resettle and assimilate the Zigeuner forcibly. Measures included forbidding Zigeuner from traveling, dressing differently from their neighbors, speaking Romani, or marrying other Zigeuner, as well as mandating the forced removal and adoption of Zigeuner children. The term Zigeuner was banned, to be replaced with the terms “New Citizen” (Neubürger/Ujpolgár), “New Peasant” (Neubauer/Ujparasztok), “New Magyar” (Ujmagyar), or “New Settler” (Neusiedler/Ujlakosok)—instantly identifiable terms that continued to single out and stigmatize Roma.Footnote 97 These decrees collectively strove for the complete “biocultural elimination” of the Zigeuner.Footnote 98 Schwicker considered the measures harsh, but nonetheless regretted their failure.Footnote 99
At the same time, Schwicker expressed aspirations for the “civilizing” of the Zigeuner: “May the future be more favorable to him, and [may] the fast bonds of spiritual and moral culture raise the despised, shunned, and banished Zigeuner to peer and equal citizen of the country; may the fleeting and homeless son of plains acquire a beloved home and a beloved Fatherland!”Footnote 100 He was not concerned about the culture into which Zigeuner assimilated, but simply urged their civilizing. Schwicker viewed Zigeuner as “Romanianizing” and “Slavizing” most rapidly, “Magyarizing” more slowly, and failing to assimilate into the German population at all: “He does worst of all with the Germans. He remains ethnically and linguistically quite alien from this nationality.”Footnote 101 Conversely, Schwicker considered the association of Germans with Zigeuner as a sign of cultural failure—chastising Schwab peasant women, for example, for consulting with Zigeuner women on magic when their husbands were away.Footnote 102 Transylvanian Saxon pastor Friedrich Müller (1884–1969) leveled similar accusations at Saxon peasants in the 1920s, arguing that the practice demonstrated the limits of Enlightenment influence.Footnote 103
Schwicker's lack of concern about which culture the Zigeuner adopted contradicted the position of Transylvanian Saxon nationalists, who had long criticized Hungarian cultural influences on the Zigeuner. As Marian Zăloagă has demonstrated, kaisertreue Saxon newspapers condemned Zigeuner performances of Magyar nationalist music during the 1848 Revolution, arguing that Magyar nationalists were thereby leading the Zigeuner astray. Saxon nationalist newspapers continued to make similar accusations about Zigeuner performances of Magyar nationalist music throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 104 Schwicker addressed a fundamental weakness in Teutsch's (and in his own) claims about German civilizing influence, however: why were Germans’ neighbors not already civilized after centuries of contact? The answer for Schwicker was twofold: first, German civilization was the culture of the most educated classes, and educating the lower classes was the task of lesser cultures, including Magyar culture. Second, some groups, like the Zigeuner, were too primitive to be elevated intellectually regardless of their culture: they would never achieve the status of a German.
Many Roma had nevertheless embraced German culture. Those in the Banat capital Temeswar (Temesvár/Timișoara) originally came from Cisleithania and thus spoke Viennese German.Footnote 105 Many worked in Nationalkapellen (national bands or choirs), whose German-language repertoire was popular entertainment in Temeswar coffeehouses throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 106 Other Roma in Northern Transylvania were Lutheran and spoke the Saxon dialect.Footnote 107 Because such examples threatened Schwicker's assertions of German culture's lofty status and its alleged unsuitability for the lower classes, he dismissed this evidence, asserting that the Zigeuner of Temesvar remained eternally alien despite adopting German. He noted approvingly that German-speaking Zigeuner remained excluded from German society, as the relative rates of population increase indicated: “Among the settled Zigeuner, just these ‘Germans’ multiply extraordinarily. The ‘Romanians’ decrease rapidly, the ‘Hungarians’ more slowly, i.e., they lose their ancestral national essence in favor of the dominant Romanian or Magyar nationality in their place of residence.”Footnote 108 Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking Zigeuner thus declined numerically as they acculturated, thereby ceasing to be Zigeuner. By comparison, German-speaking Zigeuner remained inherently alien, i.e., they remained Zigeuner and their numbers increased because of natural population growth.Footnote 109 Schwicker's views of the Temesvar Roma derived from local informant Moriz Rosenfeld, who used folk music to assert a fundamental distinction between Germans and Zigeuner.Footnote 110 Zigeuner music lacked the deep striving for self-improvement revealed in German (and indeed Magyar) folk music. Their folk songs had nothing to contribute to German culture, and they possessed “cultural and historical value only as the emblem of a people facing extinction.”Footnote 111
For Schwicker, the speed with which Zigeuner successfully acculturated into other cultures revealed a civilizational hierarchy: “The Romanian traffics with him gladly, the Magyar loves Zigeuner music but despises or ridicules the Zigeuner; the German keeps him at a distance.”Footnote 112 The failure of Zigeuner to Germanize, and the distance Germans kept from the Zigeuner, thus validated, in his view, the superiority of the German civilizing mission over Magyarization.
Anton Herrmann
Unlike Schwicker, Anton Herrmann actively researched Zigeuner ethnography. Herrmann's friend Wlislocki first inspired him to examine Zigeuner folklore, and together they collected Transylvanian Wanderzigeuner folk music and poetry in 1886–1887.Footnote 113 Yet, Magyar nationalism shaped Herrmann's interest from the start. His goal was to dismiss Liszt's thesis, which was first published in French in 1859, that “Hungarian” folk music was, in fact, of Romani origin.Footnote 114 Liszt's assertion, designed to give Hungarian folk music a romantic pedigree, resembled Magyar nationalist attempts to posit a Hunnish or Turkish origin for the Magyar, thereby laying claim to a more prestigious martial history than the (now widely accepted) alternative thesis of a Finno-Ugric origin.Footnote 115 For example, Herrmann conceded Hungarian to be an Ugric language, but considered other aspects of Magyar ethnography to be Turkic. Simultaneously, like other Magyar nationalists, Herrmann considered Hungarians to be European in character and “civilization.”Footnote 116 Unlike Turkish ancestry, Zigeuner influences linked Hungarian culture to an ignoble past. Worse still, from Herrmann's perspective, Liszt's profile as a composer quickly led to the international dissemination of his ideas. Horrified rebuttals of Liszt's thesis, asserting a fundamental distinction between Hungarian and Zigeuner music, appeared in German even before Liszt's work was translated into Hungarian and German in 1861.Footnote 117 Magyar music critic Sándor Czeke (1828–1891), for instance, published his work in German in order to reach the largest possible audience for his dismissal of Liszt's claims.Footnote 118 Similarly, Herrmann presented his thesis—that “Gypsy musicians … have especially corrupted, and partly falsified, the genuine, original Hungarian folk music”—to the Folklore Congress held in London in 1891.Footnote 119 Government-sponsored publications for international audiences regularly condemned Liszt's views.Footnote 120
Herrmann's most substantial work on the Zigeuner was a report on the 1893 Zigeuner census conducted for the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. The premise of the report reflected the state's view that vagabondage threatened law, order, and modernization in Hungary, and that almost all vagabonds in Hungary were Zigeuner: “In any civilized state there are mobile elements…. These elements hinder uniform and common progress in intellectual and material areas, hamper administration, endanger public safety, and corrupt public morality.… The vagrants here are mostly wandering Zigeuner…. As the interests of a modern civilized state required the Ministry of the Interior to take up the abolition of vagrancy as part of its public policy agenda, the matter of perpetually or mostly wandering Zigeuner had to come to the fore.”Footnote 121 This conflation of the categories “vagrant” and “Zigeuner” across Central Europe has led Illuzzi to question whether individuals labeled Zigeuner/Zingari in Germany and Italy were actually Romani.Footnote 122 Similarly, Matthew Fitzpatrick argues that Zigeuner was not primarily an ethnic term for authorities in Wilhelmine Germany, but rather a sociological term capturing alleged economic and criminal practices (“vagabondage”). Many of the individuals expelled as Zigeuner were thus not Romani.Footnote 123
The discrepancies between the Zigeuner population identified in the general census (91,603 in 1890) and the Zigeuner-Conscription (Gypsy Census) (274,940 in 1893) suggest that many individuals labeled Zigeuner may not have wished to be identified as such. Those labeled Zigeuner frequently resisted participating in the census.Footnote 124 Herrmann doubted the veracity of their testimony, relying instead on data from local officials, who were not always well informed about their subjects.Footnote 125 The results of the Zigeuner-Conscription do not suggest that Herrmann applied the category of Zigeuner to large numbers of non-Romani vagrants, however: of the 274,940 individuals the census identified as Zigeuner, almost 90 percent were permanently settled, and only 3.25 percent of individuals were classified as nomadic or Wanderzigeuner.Footnote 126 Furthermore, Herrmann excluded as “vagabonds” the many Habsburg peasants (including Germans) who annually sought seasonal work in mining and manufacturing centers in the Habsburg Empire and in Germany.Footnote 127 Between 1901 and 1910, for example, half a million Habsburg citizens (more than twice the total Zigeuner population) migrated seasonally each year, mostly across the German border.Footnote 128 Nor did the Zigeuner-Conscription reveal an economically unproductive population: Herrmann's own data revealed that many Roma were economically integrated, if socially marginalized.Footnote 129
Regardless, Herrmann's report perpetuated the Wanderzigeuner stereotype by reporting the number of Wanderzigeuner as a raw figure (8,938), rather than as a percentage, to create the impression of a larger proportion. In addition, he created a separate category labeled “seminomadic” (7.5 percent), defined broadly to include those Zigeuner living in a fixed abode yet traveling seasonally for work, those who lived in a single place for some years before relocating to another community, and those living permanently in one location but in tents rather than houses.Footnote 130 Unlike in Germany, then, where the term Zigeuner ascribed ethnic qualities to socioeconomic functions (e.g., vagabondage, criminality), in Hungary, the term ascribed the same socioeconomic functions to an essentially ethnic category, namely, individuals of Romani heritage.
The stated aims of the census were to collect the necessary data to transform Zigeuner into “decent, civilized, happy members of society, useful citizens of the state, faithful sons of the nation and the Fatherland.”Footnote 131 Ironically, Herrmann's efforts to identify Zigeuner hindered the integration of Roma into mainstream Hungarian society; the label Zigeuner, like Neubauer in the eighteenth century, bore the assumption of criminality and of being “outside the state,” thus diminishing an individual's chances for integration.Footnote 132 Herrmann proposed sedentarization and assimilation to solve the alleged Zigeuner problem. As most Roma were neither nomadic nor unproductive, however, the primary goal of the study was assimilation rather than sedentarization.
Furthermore, for Herrmann, civilizing the Zigeuner was a competitive process. Had sedentarization alone been the goal, he might have praised the widespread influence of Romanian culture on the Roma. Instead, he asserted the importance of Magyarization: “The Zigeuner can, in the bosom of the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian, reach such a level of prosperity, education, and self-awareness, of importance and human dignity, as nowhere else and in no other ethnic configuration.”Footnote 133 Herrmann denigrated Romanianization, arguing that Romanians were effective assimilators only because their own culture was primitive, because Romanian women did not practice national endogamy, and because Romanians themselves had only recently become sedentary, having previously practiced transhumance.Footnote 134 He claimed that Romanianization disadvantaged Zigeuner by integrating them into a primitive culture, “exclud[ing] them from the community of the nation without offering them social, moral, or economic advantages.”Footnote 135
Furthermore, Herrmann claimed, Romanianization caused degeneration by spreading the worst Zigeuner qualities among the Romanian population.Footnote 136 Conversely, he posited a special ability of the Magyar race to absorb other races without losing its essential characteristics, which protected Magyars from the same degenerative impact, and made Zigeuners’ healthy bodies, quick minds, and skillful fingers a potential credit to the Hungarian nation.Footnote 137 Herrmann thus reconciled the tension between a desire to “breed out” Naturvölker to extinguish them, on the one hand, and fears of racial degeneration through miscegenation, on the other.Footnote 138
Demographic anxieties drove Herrmann's view of Romanianization, then: “For the Hungarian nation, however, it is obviously a loss if just that local ethnicity [Volkselemente] that seems to be the most opposed to unity with this nation, multiplies through absorbing tens of thousands of Zigeuner.” Alternatively, the Magyarization of a quarter of a million Zigeuner would strengthen Hungarian territorial unity. Herrmann also ascribed Romanian nationalism to “egoistical agitation” and regretted that Romanians were not themselves embracing Hungarian nationalism.Footnote 139 These comments suggested a sense of desperation: population statistics revealed that Magyar nationalists were losing this struggle in Transylvania and the Banat.
Like Schwicker, Herrmann also dismissed the Germanization of Zigeuner, claiming that the gap between the two peoples’ characters was too great: “The German nature and Zigeuner nature are such opposites that they do not have any interactions except in extreme circumstances … The Germans sympathize the least with the Zigeuner and do not even have much opportunity to influence them. The Zigeuner do not feel attracted to the Germans and, in communities mixed with Germans, do not live among them.”Footnote 140 They were thus too “civilized” to assimilate the Zigeuner effectively. Rather, Magyar culture—advanced in comparison to Romanian culture, accessible unlike German culture, and granting access to the resources and opportunities of the Hungarian state—provided the best means of civilizing the Zigeuner.Footnote 141 Herrmann's emphasis on assimilation in the report seemingly contradicted his ethnographic approach: he had published approximately two hundred Romani songs in various small articles and served as general secretary of the (British) Gypsy Lore Society, and was principle instigator of the Hungarian Gesellschaft für Zigeunerforschung. Herrmann's Ethnologische Mitteilungen carried the programmatic title Mitteilungen der Zigeunerkunde (Gypsy Studies Announcements) from 1893 to 1907.Footnote 142
There was a similar contradiction in the writings of Archduke Joseph Habsburg, who, following in the footsteps of Maria Theresia and Joseph II, initiated a project in 1891 for the forced settlement, under the careful watch of armed guards, of thirty-six Wanderzigeuner families on his estates at Alcsúth. First and foremost a linguist, Archduke Joseph nevertheless encouraged the use of Romani at Alcsúth, even as he sought to force Zigeuner to become a sedentary, industrious population.Footnote 143 These values were not apparent in the archduke's contribution on the Transylvanian Zigeuner to the Kronprinzenwerk, a comprehensive survey of the lands and peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy initiated by Crown Prince Rudolf (1858–1889). Issued in German and Hungarian, the Kronprinzenwerk had two editorial boards, one responsible for each half of the Dual Monarchy. Those volumes, dedicated to Hungary as a whole, presented a narrative of Magyar achievement in which non-Magyars were largely absent. Sections devoted to Hungary's principal minorities appeared only in volumes dedicated to specific regions within Hungary. The volumes on Hungary thus reflected Magyar nationalist views.Footnote 144 In the Kronprinzenwerk, Archduke Joseph argued that the settlement of nomadic Zeltzigeuner (“tent Gypsies”) was especially important for Hungary's overall cultural standing. The direction of this assimilation was clear: Joseph specifically described the Zigeuner as “new Magyar” (neu-magyarische, uj-magyar).Footnote 145 Like the Zigeuner-Conscription, the Kronprinzenwerk reflected the Hungarian state policy of Magyarization rather than Archduke Joseph's interest in sedentarization without assimilation.
Herrmann's Ethnologische Mitteilungen nevertheless contained relatively little Zigeuner ethnography in its early years.Footnote 146 Instead, Herrmann reprinted in 1893 and 1894 Maria Theresia's and Joseph II's decrees for the forced sedentarization and assimilation of the Zigeuner, thereby underlining his focus on assimilation.Footnote 147 He considered himself to be the curator of cultural relics that should be preserved with reverence as petrified witnesses of the past, but not maintained as daily practices.Footnote 148 He also saw nothing regrettable in this process of assimilation of “inferior” nationalities: “It is not to be desired … that inferior cultures of less interest to civilization should be preserved, but that they should strengthen that element that has already fulfilled a glorious mission to the advantage of culture and humanity,” i.e., the Magyars.Footnote 149 He collected folksongs to preserve Zigeuner culture in print, even as he sought to assimilate its living practitioners.
Regardless of his own views, Herrmann was prepared to author works extolling the governmental policy of Magyarization. His efforts to advance his career through Magyarization were moderately successful: he became a Privatdozent at the University of Klausenburg, yet even the royal patronage of Archduke Joseph generated insufficient ministerial support to fulfill Herrmann's ambition of turning ethnography into a university subject.Footnote 150 The Ministry of the Interior nonetheless drew on his expertise for the 1907 Zigeuner census, and, during Hungary's brief-lived communist government from March to August 1919, Herrmann oversaw a Zigeuner education program.Footnote 151 Zigeuner ethnography provided him with effective means for both integrating himself into Hungarian nationalism and advancing his own career.
Heinrich von Wlislocki
Whereas Schwicker and Herrmann followed the Enlightenment tradition of Zigeuner reform within a framework of German and Magyar nationalism, respectively, Wlislocki rejected the Enlightenment project, Zigeuner reform, and nationalism altogether. He looked instead to the Zigeuner for evidence of the past. A student of Sanskrit, Wlislocki first took interest in the Zigeuner because of their linguistic roots in North India. Drawing on then popular notions that the further East one went, the closer populations were to their original “Indo-Germanic” roots, Wlislocki argued that the Zigeuner provided a window onto ancient traditions from the very early stages of Indo-Germanic development.Footnote 152 As Iulia-Karin Patrut notes, he thus valued Zigeuner folklore not in its own right but rather for its ability to shed light on the origins of Indo-European culture.Footnote 153 Financial concerns also motivated Wlislocki: having concluded that Zigeuner culture would soon vanish, he believed that scholarship on the topic would be particularly lucrative.Footnote 154
Wlislocki's approach exemplified the influence of Romanticism on Zigeunerkunde.Footnote 155 Internationally, many Zigeunerkunde scholars identified Zigeuner as the embodiment of Romanticism's rejection of bourgeois respectability, as well as of its fascination with the authenticity of folk culture, the cult of genius, and the elevation of artistic creativity. Liszt, for example, extolled the Zigeuners’ close connection to nature and their “ennoblement” through their musical talents as an antithesis to the degeneration of modern society and humanity's state of alienation.Footnote 156 Liszt's critic Czeke shared Liszt's romantic view of both Zigeuner and Magyar music, even as he asserted that the two were fundamentally distinct.Footnote 157 Wlislocki, who published during the revival of Romanticism in the 1880s, did not assert that Hungarian music was Zigeuner music, but did consider the Transylvanian Wanderzigeuner to be an unspoiled Naturvolk and an antidote to dystopian modernity.Footnote 158 To find “true folksiness” (Volksthümlichkeit), one must make one's way “away from the beaten highroads and laboriously seek hidden, secluded routes, where the haste of our day, which makes everything identical with its swindle of human brotherhood, has not yet completely destroyed the poetic fragrance of folk life, and where the characteristic features of the individual tribes have not yet been completely blurred, to be replaced by the social democratic project and the drooling pursuit of easy profits.”Footnote 159 Wlislocki thus marketed his work as capturing a purer, more organic expression of the human condition.Footnote 160 This approach reflected growing anxieties around the supposedly degenerative impact of urbanization, industrialization, unbridled capitalism, and rising socialism.Footnote 161 Furthermore, in Wlislocki's schema, Naturvolk around the world shared essential characteristics because of their animal-like closeness to nature and their lack of artificial civilization.Footnote 162 Hence, by studying the Wanderzigeuner, Wlislocki asserted the ability to cast light on primitive Völker everywhere—without having to leave Transylvania.Footnote 163
Because Wlislocki's claims rested on the “unspoiled” status of Hungarian and Transylvanian Wanderzigeuner, he claimed that they had fiercely resisted adopting new ideas and remained “pure” and “unmixed” through “tribal” endogamy, and also that the many isolated Transylvanian mountain villages had provided opportunities to practice primitive handicrafts, thus allowing them to preserve their traditions and nomadic lifestyle.Footnote 164 Wlislocki condemned Maria Theresia's and Joseph II's failed reform efforts, expressing instead far greater sympathy for the Zigeuner than most of his contemporaries did.Footnote 165 As a consequence of the failure of these reform efforts, he asserted, one could trace ancient customs and beliefs through later Western influences.Footnote 166 Whereas Schwicker dismissed Zigeuner “witchcraft” as superstition and trickery, Wlislocki presented these practices in the context of comparative religion, and thereby broadened the appeal of his work.Footnote 167 He asserted that, as a Naturvolk, Zigeuner revealed the most primitive, natural state of religious values, thus providing a useful comparison to other Oriental primitive religious practices.Footnote 168 At the same time, he considered the assimilation of the Wanderzigeuner to be inevitable, and consequently emphasized the importance of his own work in recording vanishing practices of the past.Footnote 169
Less condemning of Zigeuner culture than Herrmann and Schwicker, Wlislocki nonetheless presented a thoroughly Orientalizing view, disenfranchising the vast majority of (sedentary) Roma as inauthentic representatives of their culture.Footnote 170 Whereas Schwicker and Herrmann branded integrated individuals of Romani descent as Zigeuner, Wlislocki excluded them altogether from Zigeunertum, claiming that they had “blended with the lowest strata of the local population,” abandoned their traditions, and lost their language and “all sense of belonging together that so characterizes their nomadic comrades.”Footnote 171 He even accused them of having adopted the worst aspects of modern society: “There are also some international comrades among them with social democratic-inspired, unpatriotic lives, who have appropriated for themselves the negative aspects of cosmopolitanism, but less often the good.”Footnote 172 These representations echoed colonialist discourse denying “authenticity” to “half-breeds” of mixed indigenous/settler parentage.Footnote 173 Wlislocki's views also reflected fears of urban degeneration; according to the Zigeuner-Conscription, Roma were three to four times more likely to be industrial workers than the general population was.Footnote 174
Wlislocki claimed expertise in Zigeuner culture through extensive fieldwork and honorary membership in a Wanderzigeuner “tribe.”Footnote 175 By the time of his death, his mythology included a (fictitious) Zigeuner wife—something that contradicted his assertion of Zigeuner endogamy, but further cemented his legitimacy as an expert on Zigeuner.Footnote 176 (Such claims of holding a special status within Zigeuner society [being a “Romany Rye”] and of sexual relations with Zigeuner women were common among scholars in this period.Footnote 177 ) Opinion remains divided on Wlislocki's fieldwork: he apparently only made two extended field trips, and gleaned much of his material from sedentary Romani informants (whom he condemned as degenerate). From the 1890s onward, in fact, Wlislocki gained a reputation for fabrication.Footnote 178 He thus constructed a largely imaginary stereotype of the authentic Zigeuner as the antithesis of the modernity he so disliked. Simultaneously, he marked sedentary Zigeuner as incapable of reform. Hungarian and German modernizing projects could only debase the Zigeuner without offering them the benefits of civilization, just as they themselves threatened to overwhelm the other Transylvanian folk cultures. Despite later criticisms of his work, Wlislocki's publications were, by far, the most internationally successful of the three scholars under consideration here, largely because they appealed to the increasingly Romantic sentiments with which “authentic” Zigeuner were imagined in Western Europe during the late nineteenth century.Footnote 179
Conclusion
Schwicker, Herrmann, and Wlislocki represent the wide range of Hungarian-German responses to the demands made upon them by Magyarization: from embracing the Magyar modernizing project, to asserting a rival German civilizing mission, to rejecting modernization entirely. These themes also shaped their writing on the Zigeuner. They deployed the Zigeuner in support of nationalist struggles in Hungary over what made a good citizen and what path Hungary should follow to modernity. For Schwicker, the failure of Zigeuner to be Germanized reinforced the importance of the German civilizing mission. Other peoples should civilize the Zigeuner, he believed: German culture was for advancing the non-German elites—including Hungarians. For Herrmann, solving the “problem” of Zigeuner “vagrancy” demonstrated the superiority of the Hungarian modernizing project. Hungarian culture was not only more accessible than German culture, but also offered greater opportunities for advancement than Romanianization. Racial theories reinforced Herrmann's beliefs: Magyars could safely absorb the same Zigeuner that would have contributed to Romanian degeneration. Conversely, for Wlislocki, the Zigeuner showed the misguided nature of all national modernization projects: whereas the idealized Wanderzigeuner revealed the rich authenticity of premodern culture, the degenerate, sedentary Zigeuner furnished evidence of the negative impact of acculturation, industrialization, and social democracy.
As a subaltern population that was denied a voice, considered the antithesis of modern, bourgeois society, and perceived to be in need of surveillance and control, the Zigeuner provided a particularly fruitful context in which to assert these competing views of modernity. These views had far greater influence than Romani lived experiences in shaping representations of the Zigeuner. Schwicker saw no need to carry out primary research on a people he considered to be without historical agency; Herrmann distorted the evidence of the 1893 census to support his conclusions; Wlislocki misrepresented and possibly fabricated his material. Collectively, all three reinforced broader European stereotypes of the Zigeuner. Schwicker and Herrmann presented Zigeuner as a neglected, bestial people requiring coercive reform; Schwicker simultaneously delimited the potential for reform by placing Zigeuner eternally below German standards of civilization. Wlislocki extolled the virtues of a vanishingly small category of Wanderzigeuner while castigating sedentary Zigeuner (the vast majority of Roma) as degenerate. These parallel discourses branded Zigeuner as needing reform but as being simultaneously irredeemable. Changing racial theories reinforced such trends. Inclusive racial views such as Herrmann's gradually gave way after 1900, and especially after 1918, to increasingly Social Darwinian racial theories in which racial difference and the struggle for survival were permanent barriers to non-Magyar membership in the Hungarian nation.Footnote 180 Such work helped lay the grounds for further discrimination against Roma in Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere—and, ultimately, for the Porajmos (Romani Holocaust).Footnote 181
By World War I, the stereotype of the irredeemable Zigeuner predominated over notions of reform. The discursive function of Transylvanian Saxon and Banat Schwab representations of the Zigeuner consequently shifted in the interwar period. In 1918, Romania annexed Transylvania and most of the Banat. Formerly subaltern Romanians became the Staatsvolk, Romanianization replaced Magyarization, and the nascent Romanian middle class increasingly challenged provincial German elites.Footnote 182 German, Hungarian, and Romanian nationalists continued to advance competing modernizing projects and civilizing missions to legitimize their claims to influence.Footnote 183
German nationalists no longer discursively employed the term Zigeuner as a battlefield for reform, however. Rather, Transylvanian essayist Erwin Wittstock and philologist Misch Orend (1896–1976), and Banat author Otto Alscher (1880–1944), presented essentialist understandings of the Zigeuner as romantic but irredeemable.Footnote 184 In a semiethnographical, semifictional account, for example, Wittstock presented the Hungarian village sheriff as a naïve, would-be reformer whose efforts were futile, whereas Saxon villagers knew better than to try, concentrating instead on how best to manage local Zigeuner as they were.Footnote 185 Alscher, for his part, also presented Zigeuner in his short stories as a romantic Naturvolk—and reform efforts as doomed.Footnote 186
Other motivations for Zigeuner ethnography also declined. Following territorial losses to Poland after the war, the German public took a new interest in German minorities in Eastern Europe. German scholarship on the region gradually shifted from Osteuropaforschung (the study of the peoples of East Europe) to Ostforschung (the study of the Germans of East Europe).Footnote 187 German scholars from Transylvania and the Banat concentrated their research on their own communities, which opened up funding opportunities from Germany.Footnote 188 Interwar studies of the Zigeuner were largely derived from prewar works: Wittstock and Orend primarily recycled Wlislocki's material in lieu of performing original fieldwork.
The term Zigeuner nevertheless continued to serve a discursive function in German ethnographic descriptions of their own communities. Although most “Saxon” settlements were multiethnic, for example, Zigeuner farm laborers were the only non-Germans to appear as a fixed and permanent part of the Saxon village in Pastor Adolf Schullerus's definitive 1926 study of Transylvanian Saxon folklore, Siebenbürgisch-sächsische Volkskunde. Following first Magyarization and then the upturning of the social hierarchy under Romanianization, Roma were the only ethnic community over which German social dominance remained unchallenged.Footnote 189 In ethnographic descriptions, the Zigeuner were mysterious, amusing, perhaps a little dangerous and thus needing to be controlled; yet, they were easily predictable and—within certain bounds—accepting of their place in society.Footnote 190 No longer objects for reform, Zigeuner discursively functioned as the last symbol of German social mastery.
