Shifting the agency of remembering: Inventing the loyal Romani victim in the context of Austrian memory debates

Introduction: Austria’s shift towards ‘inclusive’ memory politics

Discussions about ‘race’ in contemporary Central Europe are not only bound to the specificities of national political negotiations, but often link different social, political and linguistic spheres of communication. Many of these transnational notions of ‘race’ in the present connect with (specific or unspecific) notions of the past. This is most visible in the case of Romani communities, who have been dubbed one of Europe’s most eminent ‘problems’ (before refugees were given this position in public debates starting in 2015–2016). And yet, Romani people across Europe are increasingly acknowledged by state officials as a victim group of fascist mass killing during the Second World War. To counter present-day racist violence, pressure groups and Romani organisations themselves have been highlighting the community’s identity as a historical victim group, a process initiated at the time when the memory of National Socialism has become established as the core of European collective memory (Pakier and Stråth, 2010; Uhl, 2012; Van Baar, 2008). In this paper, I will examine processes of ‘ethno-emancipation’ fostered by memory politics which are currently taking place in the Romani movement (or, rather, movements). Second, I focus on the history of the construction of Romani victimhood, while mainly seeking to understand how these two projects intersect. I argue that the mainstreaming of Romani suffering in Austrian cultural memory is due to a successful integration of Romani victims into the country’s emergent framework that now accepts the notion of a ‘racially’ diverse population in historical Austria. My analysis is based on a critical examination of intersectional aspects in these processes that have led to such acknowledgement of historical suffering and thus became part of an ongoing transformation of memory culture in Austria. I claim that the position of a group in historical narratives is connected first to the agenda of group construction (‘identity politics’) and second, to broader societal power dynamics. I am going to argue that therefore, hegemonic memory culture is strikingly paradoxical in relation to Romani communities: While Romani organisations succeeded in achieving official acknowledgement for historical Romani suffering, contemporary Romani people are continuously excluded from processes of commemoration. I understand this to be connected to the fact that memory is a realm in which cultural/political hegemony is negotiated. I confront these discussions about Romani memory partly with the backdrop of how European societies remember Jewish suffering, what some might refer to as the ‘hegemonic’ reference point in all discussions of suffering in and around the Second World War. Moreover, this article provides an analysis of these memory dynamics in the context of a gendered framework wherein I argue that gender images play a central role in developing a new racialised history of persecution, specifically in regard to the gendered prototypes of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’.

As in many European states, Austria’s increasing public recognition of Romani suffering under National Socialist rule has a second greater context: Since the 1990s ‘perpetrator’ concepts have gradually but tenaciously become hegemonic in Austrian society or, more accurately, the (official and politicised) self-image of Austrian society has shifted towards one that is now ready to deal with historical guilt and responsibility generally and thus, also specifically vis-à-vis Romani populations. ¹ The broader context of this was the dismantling of post-war historical myths at the end of the Cold War all over Europe, the specific Austrian version of which was the debate around the election of former SA member Kurt Waldheim as federal president in 1986. The dynamics undergirding these developments included a radical shift from a past which denied any form of perpetration to officially acknowledging historical perpetration, a negotiation that shaped much of Austrian political and cultural life in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Uhl, 2005). As memory activists remember, ‘to publically name the mass murder which the Nazis committed against the Roma was still sacrilege during the 1970s’ (Der Standard, 2015). This process – rarely an easy one for the general public – was partially mitigated because, as is typically the case in memory politics, Austrian society soon appeared not to be a monolithic entity. Partially, the new interest in victims and victimhood during the 1990s emerged from the debates around ‘collective guilt’, but they also made it clear that questions about the definition of who counted as ‘Austrian’ were impossible to answer (Große Kracht, 2005; Schneider, 1997). As a consequence, it became a trope of public discussion that the pre-war Austrian population had in fact been diverse, which then made it easier for historical victim groups to be integrated into the very self-understanding of society from which they had once been excluded. Ultimately, this integration blurs the boundary of the victim–perpetrator binary. In the case of the Jewish community, similar acts of inclusion also took place around the same time period but these were solely symbolic. As various studies have shown, the identification of Jewishness with Shoah memory has resulted in understanding contemporary Central European Jewishness as a mere phenomenon of the past (Hoare, 2014; Julean, 2014; Lamprecht, 2011: 229). In Austria, as much as in any Central European state, Jews make up about 0,01% of the current population (according to the last census in which these data were collected, Statistik Austria, 2007) and, more importantly, are only very rarely visible as a contemporary community. Under these circumstances, the general public has always understood dealing with Jewish victims of National Socialism as mostly dealing with murdered or expelled people, that is, with an absent population. Consequently, public perception of contemporary Austrian Jewish life renders it mostly invisible or irrelevant. Memory politics are, in this case, shaped by a kind of remorse that does not affect the present life of Jewish communities or current political decisions regarding this minority group. The supposed moral implications of commemoration thus continue to remain abstract in the case of Jewish Communities (Assmann, 2010: 105–109; Kapralski, 2015; Levy and Sznaider, 2007: 92, 99–101; Rothberg, 2009). In regard to other victim groups, such as socially excluded individuals (e.g. people with disabilities and illnesses, Jehovah’s Witnesses or people persecuted because of conduct that deviated from heteronormative standards), the symbolic integration of their experiences into official cultural memory mirrors a de facto societal inclusion or at least fundamental change of public perception in the second half of the twentieth century. This period brought about a general liberalisation of society, a cultural and social process that effectively changed the position of these groups in society. Consequently, hegemonic perceptions and the standards of social action now generally include individuals identified with any of the labels given above (and transgressions from that norm are frequently seen as a deviation from what are believed to be ‘acceptable’ forms of societal interaction). The circumstances are quite different, however, when considering the case of Romani people. They have neither vanished from the fearmongering headlines (like Jewish communities, who were mostly wiped out by mass murder and expulsion) nor has this group come to be seen as an accepted part of society (as is now the case with all other victim groups, except perhaps for forced labourers and ‘asocials’).

Nevertheless, the populations labelled by the Nazis as Zigeuner (which historically included, but was not limited to, Romani communities) and who have historically been regarded primarily as criminals, are now increasingly receiving official recognition as a victim group. This is largely due to the efforts made by Romani survivors of National Socialism and other Romani activists to publish testimonies about suffering and discrimination but, in fact, with a special focus on their position as ‘integrated’ citizens today. ² These publications were met by an interested public in the late 1980s and increased again after 2000. On the narrative level, Romani life-stories have gradually achieved their acceptance into the ‘national’ Austrian collective by being framed by authors and curators of influential memory projects as part of local or ‘national’ history but also by Romani activists’ continuous attempt to inscribe their history into the broader framework of hegemonic regional or ‘national’ history. This active attempt by Romani people to change their position in the historical narrative – from marginal to central – has accompanied and maybe even triggered this shift in memory politics. This argument, the core of my article, will be further developed as I present evidence from various community agents in these Austrian debates. I argue that shifts in memory politics entailed a twofold process: First, Romani activists achieved symbolic integration by way of appropriating the emerging hegemonic narrative of Austrians as a perpetrator society. And second, they developed successful strategies, such as relating a long-standing ‘tradition’ of belonging to rural Austria, for presenting themselves as an integrated part of society. Clearly, top-down and bottom-up approaches intersect here as do narratives of difference and inclusivity. This brings me to consider hegemony in a Neo-Gramscian sense as one of the key concepts of this paper. While Gramsci’s organic understanding of society is problematic because of its essentialising tendencies, his theory acknowledges the diffuse forms of (discursive) power, an understanding that ultimately helps us to analyse how inclusion in official state rhetoric can have bottom-up sources. Gramsci’s thinking also offers a differentiated reasoning of the role of professionals (in his theory, ‘intellectuals’, Gramsci, 1971, 52–69, 85–90), which is crucial to my analysis of the position of Romani and non-Romani activists/authors.

Communities make history or, defining an ‘us’ in recounting the past

One of the most active associations within the Austrian Romani movement, the Burgenland based Roma Service, has played a particularly prominent role in this shift of memory politics. A crucial component in achieving this shift was the large scale project Mri Historija (‘My History’) which they carried out in cooperation with the local television station of the official Federal Broadcasting Agency, ORF. It documented and disseminated the life accounts of survivors of National Socialist rule among the ‘autochthonous’ community of Burgenland Roma on DVDs and in special issues of the association’s magazine (one for each testimony) in 2009 (Gärtner-Horvath, 2009). ³ As the project title suggests, while most of the stories mention the devastating effects of persecution and the long-standing traditions of discrimination against the Burgenland Romani community, this collection of testimonies most significantly brought to light a multitude of individual memories that were not reduced to individual chapters of one overarching story (Baranyai, 2009: 13). Instead, each testimony was published separately and the DVD refrained from providing any sort of homogenising interpretation of the individual accounts. This is worth mentioning because much of the Romani movement has otherwise been dedicated to the construction of an overarching historical narrative that could be applied to all Romani communities throughout Europe (or even worldwide), in accordance with the claim of traditional 19th-century European nationalism that history serves as a source for (collective) identity. ⁴ It is not a coincidence that the very first three paragraphs of the Charter on the Rights of the Roma, published in 2009 as the foundational document of the European Roma and Travellers Forum (ERTF), an association established in close relation to the Council of Europe, are dedicated not to the rights of Romani communities, as the title suggests, but focus exclusively on Romani history instead (and notably, on a history of persecution). These first three paragraphs begin with an overview of Romani enslavement in and expulsion from India, then move on to discuss how the long-standing presence of Roma in Europe has been ‘marked by Antiziganism, slavery, discrimination, persecution, expulsion, violence and genocide’ (ERFT, 2009, 1). And finally, following this linear historical approach, the third paragraph states that:

Hundreds of thousands of our people were victims of the Parraijmos, the Holocaust on Roma, murdered in the name of the Nazi race mania, abused for pseudo-medical experiments and gassed in concentration camps. This injustice and crime against our people has too often been concealed, ignored, treated as a footnote to history, or simply forgotten. (ERFT, 2009: 1–2)

By contrast, however, the Roma Service project Mri Historija sought to break the silence around Romani perpetrators by providing concrete evidence for the multitude of Romani historical experiences. In doing so the project also managed to relay a different form of history, that is, one that covered areas thus far unknown in the (relatively extensive and well developed) historiographical literature of National Socialist persecution of Romani Burgenlanders. Another, even more apt, example is an oral history project that was carried out in 2011 when Roma Service again published a book and a DVD containing similar interviews, this time under the bilingual title Amari historija. Burgenländer erzählen (‘Our History: Burgenlanders Narrate’). While the Romani part of the title extended the ‘my’ of the first project Mri Historija to an inclusive ‘our’ in this second project, the German part specified which group that ‘us’ was referring to: the book combines stories narrated by non-Romani and Romani people native to the Austrian province of Burgenland as witnesses of the contemporary history of this region (Roma Service, 2011). This unconventional combination is striking because it reclaims the sentiment of ‘national’ belonging with a Romani possessive pronoun and makes us question whom the ‘we’ includes (and excludes) in this context. This redefinition of the ‘we’ group from a Romani perspective appears throughout the volume in accounts of different and often complex ‘ethnic’ descriptions of belonging among people who perceive themselves to be Burgenland-Austrian, such as those with Hungarian, Croatian or Romani backgrounds. This only further develops the master narrative of Burgenland provincial identity as that which was defined as late as 1919 when the republic’s far eastern corner was incorporated into Austria. And only in recent decades has this province discovered an alternative self-depiction: in addition to the traditional political image of being the boundary of German ‘ethnic’ territory, the border between ‘West’ and ‘East’, there is also a new self-portrayal of the area as one of cultural diversity and encounter, albeit restricted to the three officially acknowledged ‘autochthonous’ ‘ethnic minorities’ – Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian and Romani (Holzer and Münz, 2007; Mindler, 2011: 26–32). Evidently, the aim in the amari historija oral history project was to present Burgenland–Romani as a language and ‘ethnic’ identity that is as legitimate as its Burgenland–Hungarian or Burgenland–Croatian equivalent, given the accusation by Romani memory activists that the generally accepted ‘ethnic diversity’ of the region otherwise excludes its Romani population (Wagner, n.d.). Therefore, the project combined ‘Burgenland’ with the Romani ‘Amari’ in the title and defined the narrators as equal representatives of their province notwithstanding the different communities they relate to in recounting their life stories. Additionally, the title varies the proprietary attitude of many stories told by non-Romani speakers about Romani victims of National Socialism, which aim not only to integrate and normalise but also to control them as ‘our Zigeuner’ (Der Standard, 2010). In light of the fact that the Romani publishers dedicated the publication to the 90th anniversary of the province’s incorporation into Austria, we encounter an (apparently successful) attempt here to establish the experience of victim groups of National Socialism, specifically the experience of Romani suffering, as a new compulsory lieux de memoire of regional cultural memory. Consequently, the Romani narrative is in this project combined with the established Jewish history of the Shoa (Robel, 2009: 120–122; Zimmermann, 2007: 11, 18–22), as the following question to a Jewish interviewee demonstrates: ‘In the 19th century, there were about 8000 Jews living in Burgenland, there was a vivid Jewish tradition. I would like to know if you felt certain bonds with the Romani people? Given that both cultures have indeed been destroyed in the Holocaust’ (Roma Service, 2011: 98). The comparison drawn by the interviewer between Romani and Jewish suffering was most likely meant to help safeguard the memory of Romani persecution and move it from the margins to the centre of Austrian cultural memory, where National Socialist atrocities had become the central points of historical reference (Kapralski, 2015; Uhl, 2012). While the shift towards Jewish or Romani victimhood as a necessary element of national/provincial memory is itself interesting, I would like to point out another means by which Romani non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) changed the relevance of Romani memory: Roma Service succeeded in integrating the history of Romani suffering into Austrian cultural memory as a result of how it chose to present the Romani interviewees. Specifically, the project amari historija depicts Romani witnesses in exactly the same way as their non-Romani counterparts. The Romani speakers are shown here not as uprooted victims embodying a certain period of suffering (an association which is now vital to Austrian cultural memory), but rather as loyal Austrians, and especially loyal Burgenland citizens. For example, one of the life stories is titled ‘I was born in Austria, I am a Burgenlander and a Zigeuner’ (Roma Service, 2011: 28, 33). Here, these various levels of belonging do not interact or relate to each other in a straightforward or hierarchical way. There is no attempt to highlight one category of identification over the content of another, nor does the interview relate the idea of a stable multidimensional belonging, such as Rozenblit’s (2001) famous Jewish ‘tripartite identity’. However, the interviewee does not present the different references for identification as exclusionary categories either (Ashplant, 2005: 68; Carbado, 2013: 813; Patil, 2013: 862–863). These Romani contributions are relevant not only because they mark a shift in Romani memory politics, but also because they evidently draw on central characteristics of cultural memory which themselves have inspired other narratives of integrated Romani Austrians. For instance, author Ludwig Laher presented such a story in a nationally published newspaper essay in which he described how many villages in Upper Austria were home to a Romani (specifically: Sintikani ⁵ ) family that was ‘quite integrated’ and remembered positively in local memory narratives (Der Standard, 2010).

This example of an oral history project is one of many that illustrate clearly how the Romani historical experience has travelled into the spotlight of Austria’s official memory politics. Formal political ceremonies and school books are other areas that signify the extent to which Romani history is now represented and often, in important ways. For example, a striking case for this shift was evident at the state funeral of the then incumbent President of the Austrian Parliament, Barbara Prammer, held in front of parliament on 9 August 2014. The official speeches and the ceremony itself were framed by music of three distinctive types: military, Jewish and Romani. The commentator of the state television channel explained that this combination of musical choices had to do with the late President’s dedication to minority politics and dealing with Austria’s conflicted past in a way respectful to the victims. In the final part of the ceremony, then president of the Federal Council gave a speech, in large part in the Slovene language, which was immediately followed by a performance of ‘Dželem, dželem’ (introduced by the commentator as the official Romani anthem) during which representatives of other European presidencies of parliament laid flowers. In a state that, just a few years prior, had heavily debated the possible ways in which to grant citizenship rights to the ‘autochthonous’ speakers of Slovene in a small number of rural communities, this formal display of a ‘multicultural Austria’ indicates a significant change of attitudes. The instance made it very clear that a diversification of the image of ‘the Austrian citizen’ was successfully integrated into mainstream politics; it was now indeed part of the political–cultural hegemony (Der Standard, 2014; Die Presse, 2014; ORF, 2014).

Narratives of Romani victimhood have even entered state-sponsored historical museums separately from Holocaust memorials, such as in the exhibitions unsichtbar: National Socialist Rule, Resistance and Persecution in Styria in the museum of the city of Graz in 2008 or in we are beggars at the same institution in 2011, and most notably in the 2015 exhibition Romane Thana displayed by the provincial Museums of Vienna and the Burgenland (Härle, 2015). Although the title of this latter exhibit promised to represent Romani places across Austria, the implicit narrative of this project was not intended so much to map out Romani history as such, but to unquestionably highlight its character as part of local, and even ‘national identity’. The Romani experience was in this context acknowledged as a genuine and relevant part of Austrian history. Given that this project was financed and carried out by the biggest historical museum of Austria at the time, one understands the symbolic, official and ritual dimension of this inclusion. The exhibition signaled integration primarily through its content by first focussing on the ‘traditional’ locations of those communities seen as ‘autochthonous’ and by detailing their persecution during National Socialist rule. Second, it also told the stories of Romani migrants since the 1960s.

In summary, the result of Austrian public discussions after 1986 about the country’s responsibility for National Socialist crimes brought about the integration of the history of National Socialism into Austrian cultural memory, wherein not only Jewish but also Romani victims were finally given a place. As an effect or possibly side effect of these developments (but also as a consequence of a 1995 terrorist attack on the Romani settlement of Oberwart-Erba ⁶ ), the ways in which ‘autochthonous’ Romani Austrians were portrayed, especially Burgenland Romani, have changed tremendously, both inside and outside of the emerging Romani movement.

The examples of oral history projects and museum exhibits that I have discussed in this section – all of which can be thought of as employing mnemonic counter-strategies – managed to subvert prevailing images of Romani history (read: negatively or positively racist, criminalising and/or nostalgic) and also change the discursive position of Romani Austrians in the process. There is, however, an evident downside to the prevalence of this ‘integration’ paradigm across all of the examples mentioned: These narratives argue that the persecution of the Burgenland Romani population was illegitimate because it targeted a community whose members are today well-integrated Burgenlanders/Austrians. Although the history of persecution as well as the position of the community is so strikingly different from the German context, the model for these strategies was clearly influenced by the activities of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, which had previously achieved similar success in gaining official forms of recognition for Romani suffering in the country’s mainstream sphere of cultural memory (Margalit, 2002; Robel, 2009: 113–115). Such community activism and counter-hegemonic memory politics, be it within the context of an established German memory politics or one in which National Socialist history has a more fragile positioning (as in Austria), featured two central aspects: First, it is reminiscent of what Levy and Sznaider (2007) call a ‘cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memory’, which begins always with the Jewish experience of the Shoah (Zimmermann, 2007: 8–18) and second, it homogenises Romani experiences (with one another and against the backdrop of the ‘Jewish model’) for the sake of narrating a ‘shared’ story of victimhood (Robel, 2009: 23–25). The prevalent focus of these politics on so-called ‘autochthonous’ Romani communities silences any experience that deviates from the norm of the ‘integrated’ Romani protagonist as established by these projects, and is illustrated against the background of a pre-war setting of impoverished middle-class or working-class Roma and legitimised for the national narrative by essentialising a rhetoric of ‘descent’, ‘tradition’ and ‘autochthony’, literally describing them as emerging from the nation’s soil. The story relays the catastrophe (but also success) as encountered by these protagonists and also, their sense of unjust exclusion from the society in which they had been integrated before National Socialism (Margalit, 2002: 197–208). As Blumer, among others, has pointed out, these memory politics intensify or even generate an essentially racist binary between the ‘legitimate’ Romani citizen versus the ‘problematic’ migrant (Blumer, 2011: 54; Klein, 2016: 292).

Memory as a source of abstract ‘moral lessons’

This division between the accepted ‘authentic’ national Romani minority and the problematised Romani ‘others’ might partly help to explain the simultaneous increase of Romani integration into Austrian memory politics and racist rhetoric against this same population that I discussed at the beginning of this paper. What we see taking place here is a practice that I refer to as non-committal memory, that is, the act/process of abstractly making reference to memory whilst negating all connections between contemporary discrimination and historical suffering. This disconnect helps to create a painless official acknowledgment of past suffering and responsibility that, at times, even ends up functioning as a political strategy for ruling parties seeking to calm public opinion. For example, when in spring 2018 the Austrian government announced to construct a central monument in Vienna for Jewish victims of National Socialism, many commentators saw this as a response to ongoing neo-Nazi scandals involving members of the smaller governing Freedom Party (Der Standard, 2018). Here, non-committal memory reveals a disconnect between past and present policies, and delegitimises a comparison between the persecution of past victim groups and the criminalisation of present-day people (mostly migrants). A similar example, but in the Polish context, is discussed by Slawomir Kapralski who details a process of disconnection between every-day and state-official narratives. In Poland, the lack of ‘social memory’, thus a lack of commitment to translate memory into social politics, has already resulted in new racist myths (Kapralski, 2017: 10, 14–15).

The difference in official treatment of ‘past’/’citizen’ versus ‘present’/’migrant’ Romani people originates in a disconnect of a different kind, as illustrated by the following anecdote: On a Sunday in May 2012, a memorial for Romani victims of National Socialism was inaugurated in the local community of Weizberg in the province of Styria. This monument emerged out of a local non-Romani initiative, and displays two detached wheels of a broken axle on concrete that once belonged to a livestock wagon. The location of this memorial has no historical Romani relevance nor is there – and this is crucial for my following argument – any recorded instances of a presence of Romani people in Weizberg altogether. The positioning of the memorial here thus illustrates how National Socialist perpetration of Romani communities has started to occupy one of the central places of Austrian hegemonic cultural memory. Said otherwise, when Austrian societies tell their past according to the narrative of the perpetrator society, Romani suffering is now generally an integrated part of this story. Notably however, there exists a strong contrast between the significance of memorials such as the one at Weizberg for the perpetrator society versus their general irrelevance for Romani organisations, that is, for the group being commemorated. Given the lack of historical or present connection between local history and Romani history, the Weizberg memorial illustrates quite figuratively the preconditions under which Romani victimhood during National Socialism is now being remembered: The increased official recognition of how Romani groups suffered in the past coincides with, and is maybe even bound to, the decreased visibility of those who could actually represent this group. Given the particularities of a Romani memorial at a place where Romani people have no recorded history, it is evident that the goal of the initiators was to utilise memory as a source for abstract societal ‘moral lessons’. Notwithstanding that evident disconnect, the initiators of the memorial describe themselves quite differently, as supporters of a committed interpretation of memory, and with the intention of asking difficult questions for the present and in order to enable change. The inauguration of the memorial was part of a series of events and lectures organised by a local memory initiative called ‘Roma in movement’ which emphasised current forms of discrimination, ignorance and racism against Roma people generally. As written in media reports about the activities, ‘The topic of social exclusion is of enormous relevance in this day and age according to [the head of the initiative] Seereiter: “Additionally, Roma unfortunately don’t have any advocates present.”’ (Kleine Zeitung, 2015). While the series of events clearly emphasised the history of National Socialist persecution, it featured a meeting of Slovakian Romani and Austrian youth. While this single event demonstrated that some members of the initiative were, in fact, very committed to questioning stereotypes about Romani people in the present day, its significance remained completely detached from Romani communities. It simply provided the public with a short cursory reference to the issue of begging (which is synonymous with Romani migration in this local context, see Benedik, 2010). While the activities sought to raise awareness about stereotypes, they failed to set up an inclusive debate involving Romani agents and responding to their (political) interests in present society. Notably, Romani people were completely excluded from the project and the memorial design (Kleine Zeitung, 2015).

The debates about Austrian contemporary history in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War relied on a broad definition of victimhood (following the paradigm that Austria was Nazi Germany’s first victim), wherein even Wehrmacht soldiers were understood to be ‘victims of a detrimental period’ or that they were fighting on the ‘right side’ (against Communism); only in later years would the country gradually open up to new paradigms that also recognised victims of racist persecution. In this context, questions about persecution were embittered sites of conflict and contestation in Austrian society, particularly after the late 1980s when a redefinition of Austrian history began to take place – on par with the recognition of historical responsibility by German society – that led to an official commitment to remember victims of racial discrimination by Austrians and Austrian society (Uhl, 2005: 86–92). Against this backdrop, the recognition of Austria’s perpetrator status towards Romani people has not only meant that Romani people have been elevated to the level of national importance but it also represents major societal shifts in how the country deals with its violent past (that is, not ‘only’ vis- à-vis Jewish victims).

However, this responsibility to meaningfully represent Romani suffering in current public life is based on a limited definition of ‘the victim group’. In short, what made the mainstreaming of Romani suffering possible is that Austrian narratives of a traumatic past relied on a very narrow definition of (Romani) victimhood, wherein the victim group under question has very little present-day visibility and thus, limits the political agency to be gained by the Roma population from this position. This trend resembles aspects of the established ways in which Central European states have been dealing with the Shoah in relation to Jewish communities, despite all the differences between, for example, Jewish and Romani memory. As Wolejszo and Woolford (2006: 883–885) have argued, the Jewish model of dealing with victimhood does not only include awareness raising in public discussion and attempts at social mobilisation, but also a focus on legal aspects, mostly notably in terms of ‘reparation’ or ‘compensation’ measures. As discussed earlier in this paper, these successful Jewish cases were important examples for Romani survivors attempting to gain recognition and compensation for past suffering (Margalit, 2002). The extent to which the hegemonic perception of Jewishness across Austrian society has treated Jewish life as something in the past has made it easier for this society to officially acknowledge past suffering and accept responsibility for past wrongdoing. In my interpretation, the accepted, hegemonic approaches in Austrian memory narratives disconnect past and present to allow for a painless official acknowledging of past suffering and responsibility, where ‘painless’ may refer to the freedom of divesting responsibility in two ways: First it affords present communities the status as a former victim group exclusively at the level of the symbolic. Second, it constructs a cultural memory that remains abstract and non-committal towards present communities, their struggles and potential experiences of oppression, discrimination or even persecution today.

These considerations mirror the relevance of memory politics for minority formation and the Romani movement in Austria as well as in Europe generally, where memory politics have been ‘on the agenda’ from the very start of the international Romani movement (Kapralski, 2007, 2008: 106). Memory politics are typically vital for the constitution of ethno-political or civil-rights movements within marginalised communities (Kapralski, 2008; Kennedy, 2015). This holds true for state policies towards ‘autochthonous’ Romani minorities as well as for their bottom-up form of self-organisation. In their explanation of the circumstances that led to the official recognition of the Austrian Romani community as an officially acknowledged national minority (i.e., Austria’s ‘autochthonous’ Romani community), Gerhard Baumgartner and Florian Freund go beyond references to historical persecution as the obvious ‘trigger’ for Romani ethno-nationalism (the commonly held theory about the formation of German Sinti organisations) and instead, account for the rather early acknowledgement of a Romani ‘ethnic minority’ in Austria and the establishment of a Romani Minority Council (Volksgruppenbeirat) in 1993 when the state had to improve its international reputation in the aftermath of the 1986 election of a former Nazi intelligence officer, Kurt Waldheim, into the office of the Austrian federal presidency (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 205, 212). Similar political dynamics could be observed after the election of a far right-wing government in 2000, when Romani survivors profited from ‘compensation’ and ‘reconciliation’ measures that were subsequently implemented by the new right-wing government as ‘proof’ (directed especially to the international public) that it would take a ‘responsible’ position vis- à-vis the country’s National–Socialist past (Fonds für Versöhnung, Frieden und Zusammenarbeit, 2015).

Baumgartner and Freund do, however, also discuss the use of history for the Austrian Romani movement. While the early 1990s (the time period directly preceding official recognition of the Roma genocide) saw heated debates between representatives of different Romani communities over their different interpretations of what a history of persecution could teach Austrian society in the present, the notion of shared suffering has nevertheless served as a common denominator for all Romani organisations officially acknowledged as ‘autochthonous’, irrespective of different geographical areas, divergent backgrounds, competing interests and political aims. This was also the time when the memoirs of Auschwitz-survivor Ceija Stojka, first published in 1988, rendered visible the lives and persecution of Romani people to a broad public. Baumgartner and Freund also give credit to the influence of the early work of professional historians on shifts in public perception, most notably Erika Thurner who was writing at the beginning of the 1980s and deeply involved in Romani memory activism (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 209–210). Moreover, the authors argue that the ‘joint remembering of the persecution’ was the sole signifier, the ‘binding element’, even an ‘identity marker’ (Identitätsmerkmal) for Austrian Romani people. Such claims again resemble how memory of the Shoah has been framed by scholars of Jewish Studies as a central component of contemporary Jewish belonging and identity (Charme, 2000: 140). Consequently, Baumgartner and Freund mention a number of commemoration activities and commissioned memorials as the main achievements of the Austrian Romani movement in general and in doing so, they too reduce the work of the council to memory politics. And indeed, although not a single Romani organisation in Austria has ever declared itself to be primarily concerned with the memory or history of National Socialism, after the establishment of the aforementioned formal Minority Council, which represented all of those individual organisations, some of its first activities were, in fact, oriented toward commemoration of the past (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 215–218). Thus, the Minority Council’s focus on memory politics generated a common ground for homogenising concepts of Romani belonging (e.g. the dismantling of differences between Romani and Sintikani or Burgenland and Viennese communities), and gave the broader public the impression that Romani interests were mainly concerned with the past, not the present. I thus argue that both effects of the Minority Council’s work have been vital components for this shift in official commemoration, that is, for the integration of Romani suffering into Austria’s mainstream cultural memory.

Simultaneously, these examples of Romani politics of representation help to explain the contradictory position of Romani subjects in Austria’s memory and migratory politics. To be more specific, this has much to do with issues of visibility and a lack of connection between present representations of Romani people and the discourse about the historical fate of historical victim groups. First, hegemonic voices in Austrian society tell a completely different story about the suffering and extermination of Romani people in the past than they tell about Roma migrants in the present, especially those migrants who end up begging on the streets of Austria today (Benedik, 2010). They typically ignore the historical fact that migratory groups are also direct or indirect victims of racist persecution during the Second World War (Fischer von Weikersthal et al., 2008). Second, these stories of suffering generate an invisible victim group that has very little relation to real people in the present. This is especially paradoxical considering that one of the key features of how Romani migrants are represented in public discourse has to do with their presence and visibility as beggars on the street. Thus, one cannot ignore them in everyday contemporary life. Third, the stories included in hegemonic memory narratives tend to be abstract, failing to offer grounds for political commitment to present-day issues and thus, a clear example of mainstream society’s enactment of non-committal memory.

A final example of such disconnect between past and present is a memorial that was initiated by an NGO specialised in memory politics and also dedicated to integrating Romani victims into their activities. In 2013, the Graz-based association, Gedenkkultur (Memory Culture), commemorated a police assistant named Franz Baranyai in the form of a small ‘stumbling stone’ (Stolperstein) street memorial, a commemorative form that is quite well known across Austria and much of Europe for that matter, a project initially conceived of by Cologne artist Gunther Demnig. Gedenkultur’s choice of commemorating Baranyai is curious considering the fact that he was a member of the National Socialist party who did not consider himself to be Romani (a Zigeuner), in contrary to the officials. Also, it seems odd given all the other individuals who could have been memorialised, not least of all, people born in Graz who came from Romani communities. But Gedenkkultur chose to commemorate Baranyai because of the prominent and widely received historical research at the time. It found that Baranyai, believed to have been a Zigeuner by the Nazis, rejected this label but was nevertheless murdered at Auschwitz (Halbrainer et al., 2008: 94–95). While scholarly research on his biography has emphasised the ambivalence of this case, the ‘stumbling stone’ memorial honouring Baranyai omits any of the complexity from this specific history. The Graz provincial police headquarters assumed responsibility for financing and maintaining the ‘stumbling stone’ and the small memorial was consequently located in front of the provincial police headquarters, what was assumed to have been Baranyai’s workplace (Verein für Gedenkkultur, n.d.). This is paradoxical since Baranyai worked as a simple police assistant or ‘police aide’, while the place of the memorial and the wording suggests that he was employed in the highest level of police bureaucracy. Even more problematic is the fact that this commemoration, given the lack of historical context included in the actual ‘stumbling stone’ memorial, depicts a member of the police as the victim, instead of as a perpetrator, of National Socialism. This is especially significant in light of the stone’s placement in front of a building where the Nazi police engaged in actions against ‘racial’ and political minorities. Additionally, since no other memorial exists today that mentions the complicity of Graz police perpetrators, the deployment of Baranyai’s biography in the context of organised commemoration ends up being disconnected from the actual nefarious history and circumstances that marked his life. One could arrive at the conclusion that it is rather cynical to, first, remember somebody as a member of a victim group when in fact he was a member of the National Socialist party and second, to fail to signify the place where such racist decisions were made daily as a place of perpetration, the people who worked there as perpetrators. In an entire historical contortion, the memorial ends up honouring the police headquarters as the workplace of victims of National Socialism. The reason that I mention this case – in addition to the fact that it is the only memorial in Austria’s second biggest city that explicitly relates to Romani victimhood – is because this small street memorial demonstrates how the heterogeneous structure and the polylogue of Romani victim narratives, as well as the decentralised organisation of remembrance in Austria, allow for the emergence of contradictory interpretations of the history of persecution. There was neither a master narrative to which the memory of Franz Baranyai could have been compared to – nor was there an organisation that had the authority to intervene.

Agents of memory: Gender and the individualisation of commemoration

As I mentioned at the start of this article, an organisation of the Austrian Romani movement was the first one in Europe to carry out academically designed first-person interviews with Romani survivors of National Socialism. Strikingly, these interviews were never integrated into a streamlined, homogenous group history. Rather, the organisation published each life narrative in a separate number of their community journal – most of which did not shy away from including the complexities of history. Among them there were critical assessments of the Romani movement or accounts of how detrimental the violence of Romani ‘capos’ was for other members of the community – topics that could be seen as ‘inconvenient’ or even counterproductive to the organisation’s own cause. The mentioned intra-group violence, for example, complicates the relationship between the gendered architypes of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, as Romani people are making other Romani people responsible for crimes in camps. The fact that this historical topic is made central in the preface to the whole series of community journal numbers by the head of the publishing Romani organisation can be understood as evidence for how stable he estimated their position with society to be. Evidently, he did not feel any need to emphasise their role solely as victims (Gärtner-Horvath, 2009: 6).

However, there is also a more profound reason behind all of this, as it relates to the culture of narrating suffering under National Socialism and its gendered codes. The interviews do not limit the images of the protagonists to stereotypes of the victim (passive, broken, gentle) (Baranyai, 2009: 1–3, 7, 9; Müller, 2009: 12; Papai, 2009: 3, 6–8). It seems as if the established gender binary of European memory culture (victim vs. resistance fighter) did not fit the individual narratives. Thereby, however, they offered a more complex picture of historical crimes and suffering. In the final section of this paper I argue that this is a crucial element of Austrian Romany memory. A homogenisation of Romani memory was less desirable in Austria than in other European countries, arguably because heterogeneous narratives which highlighted an individual experience successfully increased the agency of these people who then – in turn – could speak out about a broader agenda of political ‘Romani causes’ without having to be an active member of an organisation of the Romani movement. Thus, I would like to highlight the relevance of individual victims and survivors as well as the relation between agency and structure in this paper’s final part. A gender studies informed perspective allows us to take a close look at how individual agency plays into societal/cultural developments while also bearing in mind the centrality of power relations at play. Many of the racist perspectives on Romani history are shaped by the dynamics of desire (for a life outside societal and economic restrictions) and rejection, which entail a gendered, if not sexualised, subtext. The gendered subtext of memory lies in the binary juxtaposition of victim and perpetrator, which typically erupt in emotionally charged and discussions about the National Socialist past. This is as true in Austria as it is elsewhere in Europe.

Individual people or long-term projects driven by personal dedication have been of utmost influence to the above-described shift in memory politics, either in the ways in which personal narratives shaped collective narratives of the past or because biographic storytelling is often useful to make the complex history of persecution more comprehensible. Biographies of one individual person can therefore offer valuable perspectives on the history of a community, particularly as a source for examining the interdependencies between individual and shared history and as a way to analyse the paradoxical position of specific victim group histories in regard to current political issues.

In Austria, the situation of Romani memory politics has been quite unique when compared with the rest of the European continent because public discussion about Romani suffering during National Socialism was not initiated by means of political protest (as in the ‘model’ German case, especially throughout the 1970s and early 1980s), but rather via narratives which attempted to evoke notions of authenticity and intimacy (e.g. by making personal memories public). Whereas in Germany discussions about the place of Romani suffering in ‘national’ memory tended to be concentrated in the political sphere, similar discussions in Austria were carried out in the arts and culture sections of the newspapers (Bogdal, 2011: 442; Die Tageszeitung, 2015; French, 2008: 67–69). The Austrian equivalent to Romani Rose, the central agent of German Romani memory, was not Rudolf Sarközi, the long-serving chairman of the Minority Council for Roma (which, in theory, has much more institutionalised legitimacy as an official state advisory council than the German Central Council, which is a private association). Rather, the central figure for Romani Austrian memory debates has been the Lovari artist and Auschwitz survivor Ceija Stojka, who rose to prominence following the 1988 publication of her memoirs, We Live In Seclusion (Stojka, 1989). However, it took more than two decades until she became the most eminent representative of Austrian Romani communities. While the public was already used to female survivors of National Socialism, the vigour with which Ceija Stojka deducted political agency from this position was at odds with hegemonic gender images in Austrian society, especially in the political culture of Austria in the 1990s. However, in the cultural realm, gender politics were already different: The books, movies and poems Stojka subsequently published continued to have an enormous influence on the way in which various publics in Europe and beyond were thinking and speaking about Romani suffering during National Socialism. For example, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Stojka is the only Romani woman (along with one other Romani person out of 37 victims) to be featured on the ID cards that the museum hands out to every visitor of the permanent exhibition as a way of ‘personaliz[ing] the historical events of the time’ (USHMC, n.d.). Although Stojka did use her increasing popularity as a vehicle for political commentary and protest, she never presented herself as a member of a Romani organisation or participated in the Romani movement in any sort of institutionalised role (Der Standard, 2008; Eder-Jordan, 2013, 2016: 203–204; Stojka, 2008: 133–134). At first glance then, this reveals a gendered differentiation: being active in the cultural sphere represented a political cause for Stojka and understanding oneself as an artist included activism, but she refrained from ‘politically representing’, from ever speaking on behalf of a whole community. Instead she focussed on the narration of very emotional and intimate stories, making herself highly vulnerable (Toninato, 2014: 102–103). These are all binaries that mirror the modern gender order (Hausen, 1976). However, this division is based not only on the activities of this particular agent of memory, but also on how she has been publically depicted by others. Stojka has, in fact, consistently emphasised her political agenda, but was often viewed (and respected) solely as a survivor and story-teller. This gendered and quite apolitical image resulted from the ways in which the broader public and also academic discourse have framed and received survivors of National Socialist violence generally, thereby constructing a public image of a ‘private’ Ceija Stojka (Eder-Jordan, 2016: 203–205). Additionally, Stojka’s biographical accounts structure the forms in which the Romani narrative was integrated into Austria’s ‘national memory’. Although Ceija Stojka’s art was less bound up in restrictive forms, it was nevertheless quite normative, as I will explain in the following (Toninato, 2014: 82, 103).

The presentation of autobiographical writing, poetry and the naïve style of painting that Stojka is associated with has now become the normative medial form of Romani remembrance in Austria (French, 2008: 67; see also Horvath, 2003; Stojka, 2008). Nowadays we can also see how these forms have not only influenced the memory of National Socialist persecution in the country, but also the representation of other instances of violence towards, or discrimination against, Romani people. This is especially obvious when we look at the work of other prominent Romani Austrians. For example, the father of one of the Romani victims of a bomb attack in the Burgenland town of Oberwart-Erba in 1995, Stefan Horvath, gained public awareness and significantly contributed to improving the situation of his community through his writing of autobiographical texts rather than through his direct activist work (Horvath, 2008, 2013). In his literary work, Horvath draws heavily upon the relevance of cultural memory regarding the ongoing presence of National Socialist persecution for members of the second and third generation (he was born in 1949 and is thus considered second generation). This theme is most apparent in his compilation of stories, poetry, songs and drawings (which are again naïve in style, but have been done by school children), I was not in Auschwitz (Horvath, 2003). Horvath’s work does not only represent the influence of Ceija Stojka, but perhaps even more significantly, how narratives of Romani life experience from different Romani communities, backgrounds and generations have contributed to a more heterogeneous form of Romani memory in Austria. Horvath’s example is in my understanding also questioning gender stereotypes of victim and perpetrator. However, he achieves his position as a storyteller again by gendered references, especially to the role of the mourning father. As with Ceija Stojka his narrative is meant to speak not only for him, but also for those whose voices have been silenced most violently.

Authors from outside the Roma community, most prominently writer Erich Hackl in his 1989 novel Abschied von Sidonie (‘Farewell Sidonia’) have also contributed to an increased variety of narratives about Romani suffering and gendered images of violence and suffering (Krick-Aigner, 2006; Vestli, 2003). Therefore, even the most iconic milestones that led the way towards integration of Romani suffering into hegemonic ‘Austrian memory’ are themselves hardly streamlined given that they originate in diverse initiatives and impulses rather than one homogenous Romani movement. ⁷ Other than the Romani women and men publishing life memoirs since the late 1980s, this would include non-Romani initiatives launching the memorials in Lackenbach and Salzburg in the mid-1980s, ⁸ or the Minority Council initiating a monument at the former Mauthausen concentration camp and regular commemorative events there by the in the mid-1990s (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 210, 216–218). Mostly non-Romani agents were behind the Oberwart-Erba memorial inscription in the late 1980s, while plaques at Burgenland cemeteries were organised by local Romani organisations around the year 2000 (Roma Service, n.d.), and finally, the work of non-Romani NGOs professionally succeeded in various prominent memory projects mostly since 2005 and also made highly visible Romani experiences in larger memory projects (DÖW, n.d.; Goldberger and Sulzbacher, 2008; Himmelbauer, 2013).

These multiple (and diverse) social actors have led to a polylogue of memories that have been open to a variety of individual stories. I consider it important to recognise how the rejection of gendered binaries of victim/perpetrator and the emphasis on the individual created a broader room for agency, and has ultimately even permitted approaches that combine past with present struggle for recognition and justice. In this context, it deserves notice that the first Austrian to ever come forward publically, visibly with a story of Romani suffering during National Socialism, Ceija Stojka, was a woman (Weinerová, 2009). Two of Stojka’s brothers followed her example and also published memoirs, both of which failed to mention her previously published narrative entirely. Unlike their other siblings, Stojka is mentioned only superficially in the brothers’ stories and does not get a voice as a family member although the stories written by these two brothers refer to the same experiences that she had previously written about in her own publications (Stojka, 2000: 18, 39). I would argue that this suggests an attempt at reclaiming the family’s history from a male perspective (French, 2008). However, the more complex historical accounts, based on different individual accounts, prevailed in that Ceija Stojka remained not only the most well-known and respected Auschwitz survivor among Romani Austrians, but paved the way for a memory culture that focusses on the complexity of the individual experience of persecution.

A similar development also led to academic historical research on this subject. One of the biggest collections for the history of the persecution of people labelled Zigeuner (among them many Romani people) resulted from the effort of archivist Selma Steinmetz who collected sources in the early decades after the end of National Socialist rule for the public Documentary Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) (Steinmetz, 1966). Additionally, the comparably early existence of significant historical research on Nazi measures against those Austrians persecuted as Zigeuner and the early commemoration of these events is due to the work of historian Erika Thurner (1983, 1984). Alongside the influence of Ceija Stojka, this demonstrates that, up until the 1990s, Austrian Romani history was apparently ‘female work’ in a gendered division of labour, implying (according to Rada Iveković’s (2005: 23) theory that feminisation always relates to devaluation) that the history of Romani persecution and thus also the memory connected to it has been marginalised and precarious up to its mainstreaming in 1993 which I discussed above. While some men also obtained positions of significance in the early processes of activism in Romani memory politics and contributed to this body of memory, no man in Austria has ever achieved a status comparable to Romani Rose in Germany (Baumgartner, 2011; Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 210–218). This lack of a central organisation (and of a male leadership) alongside the prominence of published memories has arguably been key to the development of a more heterogeneous Romani memory culture in Austria. Because the standards these women developed early on allowed for an individualisation of memory instead of developing a homogenised history of group suffering geared towards identity politics. However, these features have not only shaped the ways in which Austrian society narrates and remembers the history of Romani Austrians, but also accounts for the different forms in which public perception deployed this memory and referred to it when talking about the present.

Conclusion

This paper draws on concepts of hegemony, which is expressed in seemingly ‘universal' perceptions, understood to be binding or authoritative, regardless if they are shaped from the top down or bottom up. This paper’s focus on the tendency of Austrian memory culture to be ‘non-committal’, that is, relating memory to the past alone and not to the present, highlights the extent to which such disconnect between past and present is not only the result of political decision making and societal mainstreaming of historical persecution, but also emerges from the work of Romani agents who sought to create an ‘identificatory' narrative about Romani Austrians who were persecuted under National Socialism and thus, also fell into the trap of using a historical narrative of ‘assimilation’ as a central means of mitigating contemporary marginalisation. In doing so, these agents of memory created the impression that Romani communities were ‘different’ in the past but wholly ‘integrated’ in mainstream society today. As I demonstrated by way of community oral history projects, these narratives compensate for anti-Romani-racism by highlighting the dedication of Romani Austrians as loyal citizens. On one hand, it was Romani voices which reified the premises of an Austrian ‘national’ history as being experienced by a clearly distinguished ‘we’-group. On the other hand, Romani agents of memory rejected being dubbed as ‘foreigners’, instead of questioning the notion of ‘foreignness’ altogether.

My second main point was that Romani narratives quite successfully contributed to the diversification of self-representations of victims of National Socialism in Austria. Paradoxically in effect, they downplayed difference while simultaneously normalising narratives of racialised difference. I aimed to analyse this paradox as a consequence of a specific development in which the rejection of gender stereotypes of victimhood opened up for an individualisation of memory. Arguably, this led to an acknowledgement of a historical ‘ethnic’ diversity. When survivors told their story of racialised labelling and suffering, they appeared as ‘different’ while simultaneously inscribing themselves into the core of Austrian memory.

Throughout this paper I have also made use of a perspective that combines structural and individual aspects of memory culture as a lens through which to analyse the link between historical and contemporary agency. Any analysis oblivious to the importance of individual choices and personal narratives in the construction of cultural memory will inevitably fail to recognise the equal importance of structural characteristics that constitute its development. This is especially important in the case of racist marginalisation that tends to silence individual, less or non-institutionalised voices. However, structural aspects which, for example, contribute to the diversity of Romani communities in Austria are as vital for understanding the reasons for the vocal position of Romani representatives in defending Romani migrants as opposed to the strategies deployed in Romani communities elsewhere in Europe.

This last aspect relates to a third point that is central to the argument I developed in this paper. By comparing various memory projects from the Austrian case, I sought to analyse the circumstances that led to the central paradox: While memory politics resulted in increased official acknowledgement of Romani suffering, it also provided conditions for the continuous exclusion of contemporary Romani people (often migrants) from these processes of commemoration.