Non-committal memory: The ambivalent inclusion of Romani suffering under National Socialism in hegemonic cultural memory

Memory as a moral device: regarding and ignoring the past in Austrian politics

In this article, I will therefore demonstrate the relevance of public debates about the history of National Socialist persecution of people labelled ‘Zigeuner’/‘Zigeunerinnen’ in Nazi bureaucracy and how this has influenced negotiations in the spheres of politics, the media and the general public regarding the place of Romani migrants in the present. I will discuss official forms of commemoration initiated or partly financed by state organisations whose intentions were not only to remember the victims of past atrocities, but also to promise that memory of past injustice would somehow be used as a normative device for fighting against racism, injustice and discrimination in the present day. In this understanding, history, especially the history of National Socialism would ideally inform societies about how to treat minorities, thus also the Romani communities, according to human rights standards in the present. While this was the promise and still is the predominant political discourse about these forms of memory I will suggest that in practice, memorials and the debates surrounding them in Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany have by contrast ended up activating a sort of practice of what I refer to as non-committal memory, that is, the process of applying memory only in abstract discussions while negating all immediate connections between contemporary discrimination and historical suffering. Thus, non-committal memory disconnects present and past policies, and delegitimises a comparison between the persecution of past victim groups and the criminalisation of present-day migrants. My main argument is that this lack of remembering geared towards present responsibility is the main reason the majority of memorials that honour Romani victims of National Socialism (in Austria, but also across much of Europe) fail to include contemporary Romani people, especially Romani migrants. Arguably, this resulted from the strategies by which activists decided to copy memory politics related to Jewish victims as a ‘successful’ model of integration. Remembering the Shoah features a similar disconnection between past and present. There would have been other options available: for example, orienting Romani memory politics more towards the semantics of memorials for victims of Nazi body politics (people defined as physically/mentally ‘degenerate’ or sexually ‘deviant’) would have offered the opportunity to integrate a more socially engaging, committal approach to memory politics.

In the Austrian city of Salzburg, for example, we have the case of a city involved in the organisation of large-scale official commemorations of the National Socialist past while it simultaneously criminalises the presence of Romani migrants. This paradoxical situation is constituted by the fact that politicians and the media went to great lengths to honourably commemorate Romani victims of National Socialism while at the very same time using radical language and politics in order to accuse present Romani migrants of illicit activities. While the people attacked are of course coming from another national context (mostly Romania), they are still immediate descendants of survivors or victims of fascist extermination policies during World War Two (Woodcock, 2005: 37–39). In 2010, the deputy mayor of Salzburg featured prominently in local and national media coverage with an initiative he called a ‘strict campaign’ (‘Aktion scharf’) to be implemented by police against begging migrants (Salzburger Volkszeitung, 4 May 2010). Although the coverage referred only to the liquidation of one empty campsite and the ‘arrest’ of ‘five Romanians’, media reports described the actions as if they were necessary raids for police to carry out because all begging migrants were ‘criminals’. Therefore, newspapers suggested that a law was indeed required to fight what they dubbed ‘organised begging’. Ultimately, the deputy mayor called for a central registering of all beggars at the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior (Salzburger Nachrichten, 6 May 2010). According to the deputy mayor, such a register would help to ‘more quickly deport people who commit such crimes’, an intentionally ambiguous phrasing that hides administrative offences like begging and illegal camping behind completely unproven accusations of serious criminality (salzburg24.at, 4 May 2010):

In order to prevent the exchange of [begging] people, [deputy mayor] Preuner proposed to the Minister of the Interior to establish a central registry of all beggars. There, all persons who have been known for similar offences shall be recorded. (ÖVP Salzburg, 2010)

The language used by the deputy mayor and the strategies he suggested bore much resemblance to historical racist policies and at times even the specific language used by National Socialists against beggars, ‘asocials’ and people whom they labelled ‘Zigeuner’. Most notably is the suggestion of a racial register, which historians now understand to have been the core mechanism which allowed for the huge death toll among Romani Austrians under National Socialism (although it originated in 1928, the time of the democratic Austrian Republic; Thurner, 1983: 54). Historian Sibyl Milton (2000: 320) has explained in detail the dangers of such historical continuities in police work, particularly racist registering. The rhetorical connections to a catastrophic past in the deputy mayor’s statement did not stop there. The local politician legitimised racist policies according to an ostensible need for ‘preventive’ measures against a threat that he failed to define. Such language features awkward similarities with the common National Socialist euphemism ‘preventive combatting of crime’, used in order to fake a legal cause for the deportation of individuals to concentration camps, among them those persecuted as ‘Zigeuner’ (Milton, 2000: 317; Salzburger Volkszeitung, 5 May 2010).

Yet at the very same time, Salzburg is the only city in Austria that officially commemorates this particular victim group on a large scale. For example, a local committee has been setting memorial stones into the pavement of the city’s sidewalks as part of the Stolpersteine ( ‘stumbling stones’) initiative started in Germany (Cook and Van Riemsdijk, 2014; Harjes, 2005, Schrader 2006). In memorials of this type in Salzburg, Romani victims of National Socialism have featured prominently since the very beginning in 2007. A total of 21 such stones were dedicated to these victims (out of a total of 268), making visible their specific presence in local history as former inhabitants and labourers or as internees of a local camp (the latter being the most common case). In addition, Salzburg was the first large city in Central Europe that at least superficially dealt with the history of a local ‘Zigeuner’ internment camp by erecting a memorial to the victims of ‘National Socialist racial policies’ as early as 1985 (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 210; Staudinger, 1985; Thurner, 1983). With various school projects, radio documentaries, online and concrete memorials such as these (Cultural Broadcasting Archive, n.d.; Ecker, 2013; Radiofabrik, 2009; Salzburger Nachrichten, 25 April 2014), Salzburg seems to stand out among comparably sized municipalities where Romani victims have only very recently entered the arena of memory. In Salzburg, city council and administration were part of all these endeavours. The group responsible for the Stolpersteine memorial stones even expressed its gratitude for the support of ‘all political parties’ on their website (Personenkomitee Stolpersteine, n.d.).

Memory in diverse societies: blaming the complexity of memory on the migrant

It is contradictory if not paradoxical that a reinvigoration of (rhetorically similar) policies and language historically used against people labelled ‘Zigeuner’ has occurred alongside such notable efforts in the official commemoration of victims. What is additionally remarkable about these examples is how much they connect and disconnect past and present: The political action against migrants disconnects, to say the least, current measures against beggars from knowledge and moral judgement of the historical persecution of beggars (e.g. based on the above-mentioned racialising register), which the same city council officially commemorates as a great crime against humanity. Similarly, memorial projects for ‘Romani’ victims tend to disconnect the memory of racist persecution in the past from contemporary experiences of discrimination or racist sentiment, and thus exclude present Romani people from being represented as part of a victim group of National Socialist atrocities.

Another typical example of a paradoxical statement embedded in the above-mentioned acts is the speech of Salzburg’s mayor at the 2014 memorial event at the site of the Salzburg Romani memorial. The mayor delivered this address during the absolute peak of debates about Romani migrations from post-socialist countries. Consequently, media coverage quoted him only with references to this present issue of migration:

In his speech, Mayor Heinz Schaden also broached the current situation. Universal human rights ought to be used as the guideline for how to deal with poverty migrants. However, the social problems of Roma and Sinti in various East European countries cannot be solved on the streets and squares of the rest of Europe. (Salzburger Nachrichten, 24 April 2014)

Superficially, the coverage of the speech conveys the impression that the mayor had been informed by memory’s supposedly pedagogical implications in that the ‘moral lessons’ of National Socialism are ones of human rights. The mayor emphasised that migrants, however poor they may be (which, given the racialising implications of poverty and migration ends up reading as: ‘however Romani they might be’), will be treated according to what he calls ‘human rights standards’. I would like to focus on the semantics of this acknowledgement. If we look at the quotation closely, we see immediately that what is phrased to sound like a responsible position ( ‘poverty migrants’ should be guaranteed the right to be treated according to ‘universal human rights’) is actually masquerading as the open refusal of any responsibility ( ‘the social problems of Roma and Sinti in various East European countries cannot be solved on the streets and squares of the rest of Europe’), wherein the mayor denies any solidarity within the European framework or the acknowledgement of Austria’s and Austrians’ role in the persecution of Romani communities. Instead, the mayor’s message conveys that Salzburg won’t welcome Romani migrants because in the present they are ‘East Europeans’ and not ‘Austrians’, a message that reifies notions of Austria as ‘free of Gypsies’ rather than honouring the memory of National Socialist (NS) victims.

This rhetoric is pretty widespread throughout Europe, where Romani people are framed as the ‘Roma-Problem’ in order to justify racism against them (Sigona, 2005: 141–145). Yet, all this happens while state officials and society at large are increasingly acknowledging Romani suffering during National Socialism. Critical journalism and academic literature have offered one main explanation for this paradox: there is something specific to the ‘West’ European countries into which an influx of Romani ‘foreigners’ would create ‘social problems’ that did not occur with the descendants of survivors (while in fact after 1945 also, authorities defined those as the biggest ‘unsolved problem’; Klein, 2016: 292; Margalit and Matras, 2007). Thus, the accusation is that migrations disrupt the mythology reinforced in mainstream memory politics that ‘native’ survivors are somehow ‘integrated’ in ways that new migrants obviously are not and probably never will be. This supposes that the migrants are excluded from memory politics in order to symbolically punish them for constituting a nuisance instead of acting in an ‘assimilated’ fashion. While this analysis applies to some specific cases such as Germany, this understanding obscures the similarities in memory politics between post-socialist and capitalist countries. In my following suggestions, I also draw on the findings of Huub van Baar’s critical analysis of the Europeanisation of Romani victimhood remembrance in which he warns of the dangers of such a process because it ‘‘temporalises’ or even “universalises” the stereotypical images of the Roma as a group reluctant to be integrated’. (Van Baar, 2008: 384).

Therefore, increasing official recognition of historical victimhood alongside ongoing discrimination are not specific features of Austrian politics towards Romani communities but are reminiscent of parallels in the Czech Republic, Germany and other states. Yasar Abu Ghosh’s discussion of Czech politics of remembrance (and those attempting to repress memory) shows how these are inextricably linked to current regional agendas of racism and social discrimination. The tendency, by and large, of Czech society to divest itself from the racist extinction politics and partly even to try and justify Nazi measures as labour education policies is evidently informed by the persistence of racism and its influence on the contemporary political mainstream (Abu Ghosh, 1999; Van Baar, 2008). Scholarly analysis of German examples, however, give an entirely different impression as they are marked by the downright disconnect between politics of the past and those of the present (Herold, 2009). In Germany, while those Romani communities which are defined as ‘native’ (i.e. ‘autochthonous’) are treated both as descendants of survivors and as a victim group deserving public respect and support, communities which are perceived as ‘migrants’ by contrast are defined as a social problem without any connection to (NS) history (Klein, 2016: 290–293). In the following analysis, I will draw on these and other studies which have similarly analysed the conflict between memory politics and social politics towards Romani communities (Blumer, 2011). The approaches I am developing, however, deviate from the existing literature in two main ways: first I try not to presuppose the binary differentiation in communities of ‘autochthonous’ (and thus featuring a history of persecution) and ‘allochthonous’ (thus supposedly not having experiences of historical persecution) Romani people. While these differentiated categories have played an immense role in political, juridical and academic discourse in all the above-mentioned examples, it is nevertheless important not to treat them as a given and implicitly omnipresent. Rather, we are required to take a closer look at the circumstances under which these divisions may and may not apply. Second, my analysis seeks to emphasise the shared features of Central European political culture, namely of the Czech and Austrian contexts, while also contrasting this comparison with a few examples from German memory debates. Based on Tony Judt’s (1992) ground-breaking considerations from the early 1990s, I will elaborate on examples from the ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ contexts. Borrowing from Judt’s comparative perspective, I’m arguing for the similarities and parallels of how memory politics developed after the fall of State-Socialism.

In this article, I largely skip the broader framework of Austrian cultural memory regarding the persecution of Romani people which constitutes a shift in recent memory politics. Important for my argument here is, however, that community activism changed the position of Romani Austrians vis a vis hegemonic memory politics during and after the time of the negotiation of a memory consensus in Austria. Such integration necessarily features two central aspects: first it is reminiscent of what Levy and Sznaider (2007) call a ‘cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memory’, which centers around the Jewish experience of the Shoah (Vollhardt, 2013; 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 desired norm, that is, a story focussing on ‘integrated’ Romani protagonists, 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 coming 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 (2011: 54), among others (Klein, 2016: 292), has pointed out, these memory politics intensify or even generate an essentially racist binary between the ‘legitimate’ Romani citizen versus the ‘problematic’ migrant.

Non-committal memory: disconnecting past and present

This division between the accepted national Romani minority and the problematized Romani foreigners might partly help to explain the simultaneous increase of memory politics and racist rhetoric that I discussed at the beginning of this article. The Austrian case, however, does not quite fit into the political experience of migratory Romani communities elsewhere in Europe, where local Romani organisations often reacted with hesitation or even hostility towards Romani migrants (Blumer, 2011: 54; Klein, 2016: 292; Roman, 2014). It is not a question of Austrian Romani non-government organizations (NGOs) being ignorant towards the issue of migration. Rather, official representatives of the Austrian Romani community have been speaking on behalf of migrants’ interests whenever they were featured in the media (with only a few exceptions), and every prominent Austrian Romani NGO has signed petitions or letters of protest against the criminalisation of Romani migrants and/or beggars in Austria (Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 16 June 2014, 2 July 2014; Profil 20 June 2014; Romano Centro, March 2011). Therefore, the disconnect between memory and migration politics can hardly be attributed to a distancing of the ‘accepted’ legally ‘native’ Romani people on one side from the ‘menacing’ Romani migrants on the other, as in the German case. Instead, the difference in official treatment of ‘native’ versus ‘migrant’ Romani people originates in a disconnect, but of a different kind:

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 initiative, and displays two wheels of a broken axle on concrete that once belonged to a livestock wagon. The location of this memorial has no relevance for Romani history nor are 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 NS perpetration of Romani communities has started to occupy one of the central places of Austrian hegemonic cultural memory. When Austrian officials tell their country’s past according to the narrative of the perpetrator society, Romani suffering is now generally an integrated part of this story. The resulting significance of memorials such as the one at Weizberg for the perpetrator society is starkly contrasted by its irrelevance for Romani communities. 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 represent this group. Notwithstanding the particularities of a Romani memorial at a place where Romani people never had a recorded history, it is evident that the initiators were not aiming to foster an understanding of memory as a source for abstract ‘moral lessons’. Quite on the contrary, they describe themselves as supporters of a committed interpretation of memory, as a means to ask unpleasant questions for the present. The inauguration of the memorial was part of a series of events and lectures organised by a local memory initiative which emphasised current forms of discrimination, ignorance and racism. Yet, the memorial remained entirely disconnected from Romani communities. It fails to explain a possible connection between the present and the past, for instance, in a commitment towards the fight for Romani rights. And maybe most crucially, the involvement of actual Romani activists or migrants in the project design was missing (Kleine Zeitung, 17 February 2015).

As I will explain further in the following, I identify such structures as constituting non-committal memory. By that phrase I attempt to describe the process of referring to past violence in an abstract way while denying all connections between contemporary discrimination and historical suffering. This disconnect allows a more painless official acknowledgement of past suffering and ‘historical’ responsibility. A telling example of the function of such non-committal memory as a political strategy is the present Austrian government’s application of memory politics. Commentators have classified announcements such as the proposed construction of a central monument in Vienna for Jewish victims of National Socialism or the donation of a million Euro to the Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem as reactions to a national and international criticism of the conservative’s coalition with the extreme right, which was recently involved in neo-Nazi scandals (Der Standard, 11 March 2018, 10 June 2018). Non-committal memory disconnects past and present policies and delegitimises a comparison between the persecution of past victim groups and the criminalisation of present-day people (mostly migrants). In this understanding, memory serves as a source for abstract moral lessons only, instead of enabling a discussion of the past from a contemporary standpoint (e.g. via telling the history of people who are present, not absent). Slawomir Kapralski (2017: 10, 14–15) provides with a similar example from the Polish context concerning the 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 racist myths becoming hegemony.

Memory and place: memorials without victims

When we look at all of the Austrian locations of the memorials currently dedicated to the persecution of people labelled by the Nazis as ‘Zigeuner’ another aspect is striking: Memory initiatives seem to avoid the proximity of victims’ and survivors’ communities. In that, it is striking how typical the Weizberg case is for Austria. For example, Lackenbach and Salzburg, the cities where we find the oldest and most prominent memorials, are locations with some Romani population in the past but not in the present (Statistik Austria, 2002: 71). In all of these memorial initiatives (Weizberg, Lackenbach, and Salzburg), Romani agents played a minor, if any, role (Kleine Zeitung, 3 May 2012). Rather, even the most recent memorials were still initiated by non-Romani activists, designed by non-Romani artists, and then maintained by state or church organisations (although, now, many Romani organisations are easily available for cooperation). Alternative Romani grassroots initiatives, on the contrary, faced insurmountable obstacles when they attempted to launch their own memorial initiatives. For example, one Austrian Romani NGO tried to establish small tombstone-like memorials at dozens of local graveyards across Burgenland. Designed by local Romani artists, these were private rather than public memorials in that they were meant to serve as a place of mourning for immediate relatives and friends (Roma Service, n.d.). After years of dedicated work, the NGO has been successful in only four villages (Neudörfl, Kleinpetersdorf, Mattersburg, Kleinbachselten; Roma Service, n.d.). On the contrary, new memorials are initiated frequently in recent years and months, but all of them are promoted and designed by non-Romani groups.

Authorities and politicians in some locations are opposed to memorial initiatives advanced by Romani organisations (Der Standard, 13 November 2011; ORF, 2015), arguably because their project represents an unmediated and visceral connection between past and present. Specifically, the families of the victims are known to the local population, that is, the fate of the local Romani population is not ‘newly discovered’, as in the other examples, but has always been a part of local cultural memory (also unspoken). Thus, such memorials don’t constitute an abstract memory because they relate to a history which is very present for the local population on different sides: A memorial for deceased relatives on which present-day Romani people could place their candles in the absence of a grave constitutes a very concrete reminder of past suffering. It highlights the traces left by victims but also, perhaps even more significantly, makes visible the role of local non-Romani population as confidants, profiteers and perpetrators in general. When a memorial at such a place is commissioned, it forces the general public to deal with unpleasant questions and points out the consequences of racism and scapegoating.

A group of non-Romani artists in the same region received a similar reaction decades earlier: in 1980, a local group of artists installed a temporary memorial (called a Denkmalattrappe or, ‘fake monument’) to the Romani victims of National Socialism as a counter-monument in front of the memorial of ‘war heroes’ in the Burgenland town of Oberwart (or Erba in Romani), which is also the site of the largest and most prominent Romani settlement in all of Austria. Not only did officials denounce this art project and call for an abolition of the structure as soon as it was installed, the memorial was also defaced during the night (Samer, 2001: 49–52). Besides how the memorial explicitly called perpetrators ‘Nazi murderers’ (Wagner, 2011), what made the memorial so controversial was that it presented a concrete history rather than an abstract ‘moral lesson’. When just a few years later, in 1985, the first memorial for the Romani victims of a local ‘Zigeuner’ camp was installed more than 350 km west of Oberwart-Erba in Salzburg, it was bigger, commissioned by an established (non-Romani) artist and erected as a permanent structure. Interestingly, it was constructed at a place where there were neither Romani representatives nor local Romani people who could have incorporated the memorial into their politics or daily lives.

Memory as social politics: conceptualising victim groups as ‘historical’

With this in mind, we might come to new insights when revisiting the initial question posed in this article: how is it possible that the increasing recognition of Romani suffering coincides with ongoing criminalisation of Romani migrants? In light of the exclusion of Romani people from the commemoration of Romani suffering and the hindrances which Romani initiatives faced when attempting to establish their own memorials, this paradoxical relationship between the growing sensitivity towards the Romani history of persecution (on a symbolical level) and the ongoing criminalisation of Romani migrants (in concrete politics) appears to be a result of a marked disconnect between past and present more so than the consequence of official recognition being reserved for ‘native’ groups only. Austrian Romani citizens gradually came to be regarded as ‘accepted’ and ‘integrated’ after 1995, when a booby-trap-attack in Oberwart-Erba killed four Romani men and changed Romani history in Austria forever. Although this terror attack happened in the present, public debates treated Romani Austrians as members of a historical victim group rather than as part of a contemporary community. By contrast, migratory Romani communities are first and foremost seen as a current migratory phenomenon that is wholly disassociated from a history of persecution. Similarities and shared experiences between these groups are therefore rendered invisible. A short comparative look at how public discussions have addressed the social hardships facing ‘native’ Roma communities versus the representations of migratory communities makes this point clear. As soon as concrete policies, actual forms of social engagement or concrete questions of responsibility are concerned, public discourse apparently rejects the notion of Nazi-related victimhood not only for migrants, but also for ‘natives’. As soon as media coverage lays its focus on current societal tensions or even attacks by right-wing extremists, it fails to mention instances where these mistreated groups are in fact relatives of victims or actual survivors of National Socialist persecution (Kurier, 20 March 2013, 4 February 2015).

What might account for this phenomenon? There are several possible explanations and I’m picking one that might not look most plausible at the first glance. As Heidemarie Uhl (2009: 60) reminds us, back in 2009 there was already ‘no denying that the present cultures of memory [in “East” and ‘West’] are developing in very different directions’. Moreover, when talking about the process of integrating Romani suffering into the national cultural memory among the post-Socialist states, the Czech Republic is but one of several countries where a successful process of acknowledging victimhood and accepting societal responsibility for it continues to be a largely unfinished process (Vermeersch, 2006: 48, 82, 86). However, even the long-standing conflict for a respectful commemoration of the victims of the Lety detention camp in the Czech Republic – a case that gained considerable attention because the former camp site was the location of a pig farm until very recently (Abu Ghosh, 1999; Pape, 2008: 86) – has started to receive increased public attention since the Czech government assigned the responsibility of installing and maintaining a new memorial areal, exhibitions and events at the former camp to a state-funded organisation in 2009 and after that to the Museum of Roma Culture in 2018. Notably, in 2009 it charged the only agency for a national memorial in the country with this task, the foundation that runs the national memorial at the locations of the Lidice and Ležáky massacres of German National Socialist troops against Czech civilians (Deník, 23 August 2013; Lety Memorial, 2016). This is a very relevant shift because first, it lifted the matter of the forced camp up to a level of national importance and second it connected the memory of different victim groups together – in this case Czech non-Romani and Czech Romani. This organisational structure – which brought together various memorial sites – suggests that the Lety camp (where people labelled ‘Cikáni’ were persecuted) is also relevant in that it qualifies as part of the national lieux de memoire which is of utmost importance in Czech ‘national memory’. Blumer has analysed a similar process at the Berlin memorials, where the state initially founded a memorial foundation to run one central memorial (dedicated to Shoah victims), which has in the meantime been afforded responsibility of all national memorials for the victims of National Socialism. Just as in the Czech context, where the remembrance of innocent Czech victims of German ‘revenge’ atrocities was the central point of ‘national’ memory, the integration of Romani memory in state-led activity in Germany signified the official acceptance of Romani suffering as important to the central victim group, in the German case represented by Jewish suffering. Blumer (2011) refers to this development as a ‘memorial network’, where bureaucratic linkages denote the development of meaningful interactions between the commemoration of different victim groups rather than as a form of ‘victim competition’. Typically, this development in Germany was preceded by intensive societal debates. In the Lety case, the long-standing refusal of Czech state officials to meet the univocal demand of Romani NGOs from across various parts of Europe to abolish the highly problematic pig farm at the site (Times of Israel, 3 August 2016) should not disguise the fact that the first state memorial at the former Lety camp was inaugurated by president Vacláv Havel a few months after the pig farm first became an issue in national and international media in 1995 (Lety Memorial, 2016). With the inclusion of the Lety Memorial as the third place of national remembrance of Nazi atrocities and the recent efforts to construct a memorial site, we see a clear mainstreaming of Romani suffering in Czech memory culture (Pape, 2008: 88–89). However, when the Czech government decided this year to hand the Lety site over to the prominent Museum of Romani Culture, it rendered Romani voices visible as contributors to memory culture. Additionally, this might also be interpreted as an act in which the government admits that the seamless inclusion of Romani suffering in conventional national memory failed and that memory politics need to change when acknowledging new victim groups. As in the Austrian case, the memory of Romani suffering was integrated into the historical narrative and given a prominent place in official cultural memory – but in the Czech Republic Romani cultural institutions where at least considered relevant in this process. And yet again, the Lety story is not only a commitment to inclusion, remorse and responsibility. It is also a striking example of ignorance towards the communities whose members had been persecuted there. It took state officials more than ten years to revoke their refusal to buy the pig farm and shut it down – out of respect for Romani victims and survivors (Respekt, 4 November 2017: 12–15; iDNES, 2017). And again similar to Austria, increased visibility in the Czech Republic of Romani suffering hasn’t necessarily led to anti-racist, supportive or respectful present-day policies and language.

Memory as contested ground: defining victim and perpetrator

This comparative approach between Austria and the Czech Republic reveals, however, some important differences in these countries’ respective ‘national memories’. The debates about Austrian contemporary history in the immediate aftermath of World War Two relied on a broad understanding of victimhood (following the paradigm that Austria was Nazi Germany’s first victim), wherein even Wehrmacht soldiers were understood to be legitimate fighters and thus, ‘victims of a detrimental period’; only in later years would the country gradually open up to new paradigms that also recognised victims of racist persecution (Uhl, 2005: 86–92). In this context, questions of persecution were embittered sites of conflict and contestation in Austrian society, particularly until the late 1980s, when a redefinition of Austrian history began to take place that led to an official commitment to remember victims of atrocities committed by Austrians (Uhl, 2000). In the Czech context, however, the topos of the victim continues to be one of the most central and most contested positions in that society. Reviving the tradition of nineteenth-century historiography which focused on the oppression and defeat of ‘the Czechs’, the recognition of victimhood is still bound to narratives of worthy sacrifice (Hroch and Malečková, 1999; Malečková, 2012). Therefore, as much as accepting the role of Austrians as perpetrators was debated in Austria, the position of victim has been contested in the Czech Republic because it had historically been reserved for the nationalist ‘we’-group. In recent years, both countries shifted in their memory of a violent past: in the Austrian context, society accepted a perpetrator status towards Romani people, Czech officials included the Romani experience into the narrative of victimhood.

In the Czech Republic, this nascent recognition of Romani victimhood has no connection to current migratory policies simply because Romani immigrants are not a public issue there. In this particular post-socialist case, public discourse continues to contradict the official commemoration of Romani victimhood, most notably the multiple manifestations of everyday racism, be it by state officials and politicians or the media (Albert, 2012; Belavusau, 2013; Čada, 2012; Slavíčková and Zvagulis, 2014). It seems then as if commemoration of NS persecution does not adequately address nationalist sentiment in either Austria or the Czech Republic, which regularly labels Romani presence as a ‘threat’ to the nationalist ‘cause’, in many instances fostering pervasive racism against Romani communities. But there are also further similarities between these supposedly hardly comparable cases of nationalism. In both states, NS policies almost annihilated the Romani population. Thurner (1983: 54) and Šípek (1989) hold accountable registration policies developed by the officials of the democratic republics long before National Socialism. The higher number of Romani Czechs than Romani Austrians today is the result of these countries’ different historical development after 1945, something that is largely ignored in public discussion. Although the labelling of Romani people as ‘foreigners’ is not rooted in a migration history, most Romani Czechs were indeed resettled to their current regions of residence through forced or voluntary migration during the state-socialist period (Donert, 2008, 128; Pavelčíková, 2004: 6–45; Pešek, 2010). In Austria, the few Romani survivors of National Socialism tried to flee discrimination by resettling from rural areas into the cities of Vienna (and less frequently, Graz). Therefore, in the Czech Republic as well as in Austria, Romani citizens can rightfully claim that they are affected by the stories of suffering under National Socialism (if they were to be asked, of course), but many of them would not be able to relate a story of direct descent to the places in which they are presently located.

Both states have been accepting their responsibility to meaningfully represent Romani suffering in current public life, but according to a limited definition of ‘the victim group’. In short, what made the mainstreaming of Romani suffering possible is that Austrian and Czech narratives of a traumatic past imply a very narrow definition of (Romani) victimhood, wherein the victim group under question has very little present-day visibility and thus relevance. Despite all the differences between, for example, Jewish and Romani memory, this trend resembles aspects of the established ways in which Central European states have been dealing with the Shoah in relation to Jewish communities. The extent to which hegemonic perception 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 some responsibility (Bunzl, 1996: 62; Pinto, 2008: 186). In my interpretation, the accepted, hegemonic approaches in Austrian memory discourse 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 denies present communities the status as a former victim group aside from a symbolical position. Second, it constructs a cultural memory that remains abstract and non-committal towards present communities, their struggle and potential oppression, discrimination or even persecution today.

Memory and empowerment: community politics

These considerations are notwithstanding the relevance of memory politics for minority formation and the Romani movement in both Austria and the Czech Republic as well as in Europe generally, where memory politics have been ‘on the agenda’ of the international Romani movement from the very start (Kapralski, 2008: 106). Memory politics, in this case, are often 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 ‘native’ 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 ‘authochthonous’ 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. State representatives were thus in desperate need and, in the early 1990s also willing to prove that Austria was not on the right-wing track (Baumgartner and Freund, 2004: 205, 212). Similar political dynamics can 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-a-vis the NS past (Fonds für Versöhnung, Frieden und Zusammenarbeit, 2015).

Simultaneously, the relevance of memory politics for Romani politics of self-representation help to explain the contradictory position of Romani subjects in Austria’s memory and migratory politics. 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 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 Romani migrants in the present, especially those migrants who end up begging on the streets of Austria today. They typically ignore the historical fact that migratory groups are also direct or indirect victims of racist persecution during World War Two (Fischer von Weikersthal et al., 2008). Second, these stories of suffering generate an invisible victim group that has very little relation to actual people in the present. This is especially paradoxical considering that one of the key features of how Romani migrants are represented in public discourse is their presence and their visibility on the street when begging. Thus, one cannot ignore them in everyday 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, constitute a clear example of mainstream society’s enactment of non-committal memory.