Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861-1914

Lives Outside the Law

J. Illuzzi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137401717
• eBook ISBN: 9781137401724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

By the early 20th century, Gypsies in Germany and Italy were pushed outside the national community and subjected to the arbitrary whims of executive authorities. This book offers an account of these exclusionary policies and their links to the rise of nationalism, liberalism, and the modern bureaucratic state.

1

The Modern Bureaucratic State of Exception

When I first arrived in northern Italy to do archival research on “Gypsies” around the turn of the 20th century, a typical response I received from friendly archivists in Piedmont was that “we didn’t have Gypsies then,” or “there are no files on Gypsies in that period here.”¹ I knew, however, from my research in Rome, that there were, indeed, populations labeled as Gypsies in late 19th- and early 20th-century Italy, and that then, as well as now, they were widely considered to be a “problem” in need of solving. Yet the tools of the historian’s trade, the archival sources, were few and far between, and difficult to find. Eventually, thanks to the help of a national service volunteer, the city of Alessandria allowed me to access a database of all court cases from the 18th century to the present, searchable by both name and profession, which became one of the few, and admittedly limited, ways I could find a window into the way that state authorities perceived and handled Gypsies in modern Italy.

The very disappearance of “Gypsies” from Italian files hinted at the nature of Italian authorities’ approach to Gypsies themselves: if they existed, and they were present, they were not Italian, they did not belong, and they must be expelled over the nearest border.² Italian authorities accomplished this through confiscation of personal documents, administrative circulars to the various Italian prefects, the police, and the judiciary, and they utilized both national and local authorities to accomplish the “disappearance” of Gypsies. In other words, they used the tools of the information state to make those they categorized as “Gypsies” invisible.³

I decided, however, that in order to understand the Italian state relationship with Gypsies, a comparative case would be instructive. Germany was becoming a unified nation-state at the same time as Italy: making critical decisions about how to shape state structures, construct the constitution, legal, and judicial systems, whether to create a centralized state or a more federalized structure. Both Germany and Italy often have similar historiographies: they suffer, in the eyes of historians, from “failed liberalism,” but those trajectories have been more recently questioned. Comparing Italian and German state authorities’ approaches to Gypsies at the turn of the century would illuminate more than a single case study. At first glance, the German case appeared to be rather different. Both in Berlin and Bavaria, I found organized files under various headings denoting Zigeuner, from the same time period, collating press clippings, various executive circulars, communications between the Bavarian Zigeunerzentrale and various ministries, inter-ministry communications, and communications from abroad, all clearly alluding to a vigorous debate about a problem in need of control and monitoring, but also a sign that, unlike in Italy, German authorities directly acknowledged a category of persons residing permanently within the German national boundaries. Thus, the German state used the expanding capacities of the information state to render Gypsies highly visible. A clear difference of approach between the two nationalizing states was obvious. Over time, however, I came to understand that by the turn of the 20th century, Germany and Italy differently utilized the tools of the information state to place Gypsies in a “state of exception” outside of, but tied to, the national community. Understanding the functioning of the “state of exception” during the era of nation-state formation in Germany and Italy gives us a new way to think about the historical mechanisms of Gypsy exclusion in states that adhered to a universalist, liberal concept of law.

In Angus Fraser’s comprehensive work on the history of Gypsies as a “people of Europe,” he points out that there were two waves of initial Gypsy migration into Europe. The first wave occurred in the 15th century, with the arrival of “pilgrims” from the east. The second wave of migration occurred in the middle of the 19th century, sparking what Fraser calls “the restoration of an apparatus of aggression which had fallen into disuse.”⁴ Fraser, like many recent historians, stresses the continuities between the early modern and modern state, while simultaneously acknowledging the significantly more powerful bureaucratic characteristics of modern states.⁵ While the goals of modern Gypsy policy bore striking similarities to those of the early modern state (assimilate or leave), the methods and efficacy of their implementation differed. The apparatus of state were distinctly more powerful, and unlike in the 15th century, state authorities could follow through, at least to some degree, on their promises of control and compulsion of populations labeled as Gypsies.

Modernity, Legibility, and the Growth of the Bureaucratic State

The growth of the bureaucratic state shaped anti-Gypsy policies in critical ways. Christopher Dandeker approaches the analysis of the expanding modern bureaucratic state by dividing the literature into two main camps. He argues that the analysis of surveillance tends to take two tracks: the first is what he calls a “Marxist” analysis that focuses on the class basis of power, capitalism, and industrial society. This analysis tends to be optimistic, systems based, and sees the challenge to capitalism provided by socialism as a means of correcting the worst excesses of modern bureaucratic surveillance. In the study of Gypsy policy, a focus on the socioeconomic marginalization of those labeled as Gypsies, their role in the niche economies of Italy and Germany, and the study of the development of modern welfare systems helps to give the historian perspective on changing state approaches in the modern era. The second track, a more pessimistic “Machiavellian” strand of analysis, sees social life as an “arena of eternal struggle.” In this model, the state is often seen as a tool of repression, seeking to control its population for the perpetuation of its own power and the maintenance of rule. When looking at the development of the “state of exception” for Gypsies, the Machiavellian perspective is quite helpful in understanding why Gypsies prove to be such a frustrating “problem” for modern bureaucratic administration, and why bureaucratic administrations, directly responsible to the executive powers (rather than the judiciary or the legislative) react by utilizing the “state of exception.” Ultimately, Dandeker critiques both approaches as inadequate and seeks to find a synthesis between the two poles, while leaning more heavily toward the Machiavellian perspective.⁶ When dealing with a stigmatized group like Gypsies, the Machiavellian approach may indeed be more appropriate, since the goal of Gypsy policy in Germany and Italy was to “stigmatize, control, exclude, restrict [and] hunt down” those who are labeled as Gypsies, rather than to collect “innocent data on individuals that is necessary for administration.”⁷ Like Dandeker, in the pages that follow, I lean more closely on a Machiavellian approach to the development of anti-Gypsy policy in modern Germany and Italy, but I also draw somewhat on the insights provided by a Marxist approach by focusing on the implications of the growth of capitalism as a distinguishing feature of late 19th century Germany and Italy.

What changed most in European states at the turn of the 20th century was the expansion of early modern bureaucratic control and power. Dandeker offers a useful definition, drawing on Weber, of the “modern bureaucratic state:”

It possesses a legal and administrative order comprising a body of formalized legal norms and a rational bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is charged with implementing such legal norms over the state’s territory and population. This activity involves permanent and continuous exercise of surveillance. In addition, the state is a compulsory, rather than a voluntary, association. It claims binding authority over all its members, most of whom will have obtained membership by birth. The state also claims authority over all action taking place within its territory … Whatever may be the ends of the modern state, they are expressed in formally defined norms. The methods for changing the ends of the state are defined by legal procedures rather than by traditional norms or charismatic revelation. Changes in policy goals do not rest simply on the whim or discretion of the head of state.⁸

Both Italy and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the transition to unified, modern, nation-states, were becoming such bureaucratic states. The creation of a rationalist bureaucracy under the direct supervision of the executive branch is a key feature of both states, and a key to understanding the treatment of Gypsies during this era. The bureaucratic norms and the expectation of equal treatment under the law in liberalizing late 19th century societies provoked a tension with Gypsy populations. How can one treat an unwanted group, like Gypsies, equally or rationally before the law, when the goal is to rid the state of them? And how can it claim authority over them when they are not wanted or perceived of as members? The “state of exception” resolves this paradox of Gypsy policy for officials in both Germany and Italy, by placing Gypsies “at the whim and discretion” of the head of state, and other executive level officials.

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott points out how the coming of the modern nation-state fundamentally altered the relationship between ruler and ruled. Scott, in Dandeker’s two-pronged analysis, holds a decidedly Machiavellian perspective on state power. For example, he points out the novelty of last names – something that we take for granted but that have infinitely increased the power of governments to control their populations. In Italy, surnames did not become standardized until the 19th century – a key piece of information to keep in mind when one of the main complaints of officials dealing with Gypsies was their lack of standardized surnames.⁹ In Germany, the law requiring civil registration and the standardization of names was passed in 1875.¹⁰ While today, fluid name changing seems dishonest, in the 19th century, people were just becoming familiar with the idea that one’s name was an immutable attribute. The public identities of everyone, not just Gypsies, were in question. For Scott, two terms shape his analysis of the interaction of the state with its inhabitants in the modern era: legibility and high modernism. Both concepts draw on Foucault’s ideas about surveillance, the ability of states to individualize and keep track of each of their residents, and the power that the individualized knowledge could bring to state authorities. A key aspect of state power is the ability to know citizens in a statistical way, and the process of making the population “legible” is exactly what took place in Germany and Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. State authorities’ attempts to tie Gypsy identity down to one particular group, one “nationality,” one name, or one address were consistently thwarted by at least some of those labeled Gypsies.

To borrow Scott’s term, individuals and families labeled as Gypsies used the “weapons of the weak” to resist state authorities’ legibility projects. Nonetheless, the authorities persisted and attempted to create a category including specific attributes that supposedly made up the Gypsy, so they could develop “solutions” to their supposed problem. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the category was still open and undecided and the government authorities understood that there was “a certain fictional and arbitrary quality to their categories” and that the categories hid a “wealth of problematic variation.” The categories, once in place, then were used as if they were “in fact homogenous and uniform.”¹¹ In both Italy and Germany, the contours of the category Gypsy were very fuzzy before World War I and thus, its application was highly inconsistent. Over time, however, in both places, once people were labeled as Gypsies, their chances for integration into the national community diminished, regardless of where they were born and where they resided. Once the label of Gypsy was applied, the police assumed an individual’s criminality, and local, regional, and national authorities devised increasingly radical solutions to push them out of the community.

Scott’s concept of high modernism has been critiqued by scholars of Gypsy history like Leo Lucassen, who disagrees with Scott’s contention that “a lack of democracy and civil society is a necessary condition for the development of illiberal ‘high modernism.’”¹² Lucassen argues that democratizing nation-states with a rapidly developing civil society are just as likely to develop “high modernist” social engineering projects. High modernism, according to Scott, is “best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until World War I.”¹³ Scott himself refines his own thinking on both high modernism and legibility in his recent work by expanding both his notions of state legibility projects beyond the West, and agreeing with Lucassen’s critique that “high modernism” is not only associated with illiberal authoritarianism but with all modern bureaucratic state types. His study of Zomia, a hill region of southeast Asia that resisted state legibility projects for centuries, has important repercussions for the study of European Gypsies. As part of the process of the development of the modern bureaucratic state described by Dandeker above, states by definition drew a line between those who belonged “inside” the state and the “barbarians” who remained outside. For Scott, “the category of the ‘barbarian’ can have no permanent referent apart from being ‘beyond the law.’ It simply refers to those who at any given time are made to stand for an idea …. Barbarians are, then, a state effect; they are inconceivable except as a ‘position’ vis-à-vis the state.”¹⁴ He argues that by the middle of the 20th century, remaining outside of the bureaucratic state’s legibility schemes had become virtually impossible for anyone. Scott brings out another aspect of the legibility story in The Art of Not Being Governed: the idea that those labeled as barbarians were so by deliberate choice. Gypsies, like other ethnic groups, built an identity around resistance to legibility by the state, choosing deliberately to live outside of the bureaucratic regimen imposed by the state, and thus thwarting state legibility projects. Some certainly assimilated into the majority culture, yet some chose to remain outside of the state. This agency and resistance to state authority described by Scott recurs throughout this book. There is an ongoing struggle between Italian and German Gypsy populations – to balance their own way of life against encroaching state bureaucratization.

The long-term effect of both state attempts to render Gypsy populations “legible” and Gypsy resistance to those projects are particularly obvious during what Angus Fraser might term a “third wave” of Gypsy in-migration. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Communist regimes in eastern Europe, the opening of European borders through the Schengen agreement, and the economic difficulties of the post-cold war transition have again combined to create a situation in which “Gypsies” have become a target for the ire of state authorities, “barbarians” who are “beyond the law.” The contemporary strategies employed by the authorities have their roots firmly planted in the policies German and Italian authorities employed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Even as we live in the midst of the EU’s “decade of Roma inclusion” (2005–15), recent events have described a decidedly opposite trend. In 2008, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered the fingerprinting of the Roma population living in Italy, including minors. While criticism of the move was rampant (and focused almost exclusively on the children), the European Commission allowed Italy to move forward with its plan.¹⁵ In response to the alleged attempt of a 16-yearold Roma girl to steal a baby from a Naples apartment, vigilante groups in Naples burned two Roma camps and chased the Roma from the city. In 2008, Berlusconi described the Roma as an “army of evil,” dismantling several nomad camps in the country. The Berlusconi regime also passed laws making the expulsion of foreign nationals easier, and it is widely believed that these laws specifically target Roma migrants.¹⁶ In 2011, outside of Turin, a Romani settlement was burned to the ground after a teenager falsely accused two Romani men of rape. In France in 2010, the Sarkozy government cracked down on Roma migrants from Romania and Bulgaria (those states have, significantly, not been allowed in the Schengen zone for reasons of internal security), deporting at least 1,000 Roma from 200 settlements. Significantly, the Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said the measures were “not meant to stigmatise any community, regardless of who they are, but to punish illegal behaviour.”¹⁷ The expulsions have continued under Francois Hollande’s Socialist government, with interior minister Manuel Valls positing in 2013 that Romanian and Bulgarian Roma are incapable of assimilating to French society and must be expelled.¹⁸ Germany has expelled several thousands of Roma in recent years as well. Finall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. The Modern Bureaucratic State of Exception
• 2. Complex Realities: Executive Power and the Police
• 3. Executive Struggles in Italy 1861–1909
• 4. Executive Struggles in Germany 1870–1909
• 5. Creating a State of Exception: 1910–1913
• 6. The Courts, 1861–1914
• 7. Conclusion: The Modern Bureaucratic State and Gypsy Exclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index