Antiziganism and Feeling Superfluous
In today’s left-wing circles, class struggle and traditional Marxism are all the rage. They pander to the average Joe willing to work and imagine a working class that has long since ceased to exist. In this predicament, they present themselves as representatives of “the 99%.” And all this at a time when AI is on the verge of swallowing up more and more jobs. Yet “unproductive” people are viewed with suspicion by this left. One group in particular rubs the average Joe – whom they populistically fawn over – the wrong way: Sinti and Roma – the largest minority in Europe.
Anti-Gypsy attacks and intensifying anti-Gypsy propaganda in the media have been observed in this country since the early 1990s. In 1992, pogroms took place in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where the hatred was initially directed against Roma seeking asylum. Since then, reports have focused on crime, begging, and hygiene issues; in recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on organized welfare fraud and similar topics. Today, people prefer to speak of “Romanians and Bulgarians” because the term “Gypsy” is considered politically incorrect. However, this does not prevent anyone from drawing on the same stock of common anti-Roma stereotypes under this new label. Structural issues surrounding poverty and the housing crisis are ignored in the process. The right-wing shift over the past decade has only exacerbated this. Yet anti-Gypsy discrimination and persecution have a long tradition.
Modernity and Antiziganism
Sinti and Roma first appeared in Central Europe at the beginning of the 15th century. At the end of the 15th century, they were declared outlaws for the first time, a fate that would befall them repeatedly thereafter. The early modern period brought about profound changes. Feudalism entered a crisis, nation-states gradually took shape, and the Protestant work ethic came to the fore. From then on, nomadic groups were regarded as difficult to control and economically unproductive. For this reason, they were oppressed and persecuted, by no means only in Germany.
Until the Enlightenment, the image of the “Gypsy” fluctuated with that of the beggar, the vagabond, and “vulgar” traveling people in general. In the 18th century, a clear “racialization” of the stereotype took place. As is well known, the view prevailed during the Enlightenment that only the “white race” was capable of civilization. “Gypsies” were now declared a “primitive race.” As a result, social and racial discrimination became significantly intertwined in the Gypsy stereotype, which also encompassed romantic elements. “Gypsies” stood, in a diffuse way, for uninhibited freedom. This romantic dimension was fueled not least through music and dance (keyword: “Carmen”). As for the gendered connotations of antiziganism, the “Gypsy woman” was constructed as the antithesis of the chaste housewife, wife, and mother, who was conceived as complementary to the ideal of the disciplined wage laborer in the realm of reproduction. The “Gypsy woman” was primarily imagined as sexually seductive and witch-like.
Anti-Gypsy Measures in Germany
In the 19th century, “Gypsies” were considered “persons of inferior rights.” As early as the mid-19th century, files on “Gypsies” were systematically created. From the beginning of the 20th century, the aim was to register as many Sinti and Roma as possible, with photographs taken and fingerprints recorded. Under National Socialism, based on racist assumptions, it was assumed that “Gypsies” were no longer “racially pure.” Arising from the intermarriage of Gypsies with “racially inferior” Germans, “Gypsy half-breeds” in particular were deemed predominantly asocial. Sinti and Roma were forcibly sterilized and declared “socially mentally deficient.” The Nuremberg Race Laws, which initially applied only to Jews, were extended to them. In 1935, Sinti and Roma began to be interned in so-called “Gypsy camps.”
In 1938, Himmler ordered the “final solution to the Gypsy question […] based on the nature of the race.” In December 1941, it was decreed that “Gypsies” should be treated the same as Jews. Decisions regarding the manner of their extermination were left to the commanders of the Security Police and the Security Service, with the result that many Sinti and Roma were shot on the spot. In July 1944, the last gassing took place in Auschwitz, to which Sinti and Roma had been deported from numerous countries since early 1943.
In the postwar period, Sinti and Roma were frequently housed in dilapidated emergency shelters or settled on the outskirts of towns. So-called “Gypsy experts” were hired by government offices; likewise, records from the Nazi era were used – the special registration of Sinti and Roma continued. In various cities, policy documents were issued to prevent the presence of “Gypsies” (now called “Landfahrer”) at all costs.
The assessors of Sinti and Roma restitution claims were former employees of the Reich Health Office. In the 1980s, new guidelines were issued and modest reparations were granted. At the same time, some Sinti and Roma were no longer granted German citizenship. A precondition for these reparations was protest actions by the Sinti and Roma themselves, which also led to their recognition as an ethnic minority in Germany.
Anti-Semitism, Antiziganism, and Other Forms of Racism
In modern times, “Gypsies” are associated with a lack of ties and a refusal to work. But what, then, is the difference between antiziganism and antisemitism, which stands for similar things? In capitalism, Jews are primarily associated with power, domination, and a destructive civilization; “Gypsies,” on the other hand, are viewed as inferior and rooted in nature because they remind us of a possible life beyond the accursed labor society. Holger Schatz and Andrea Woeldike, commenting on this, write: “What they have in common, however, is the mechanism whereby the exclusion and physical persecution of the ‘non-identical’ supposedly provides psychological relief while simultaneously allowing repressed desires to be projected outward. What one cannot have oneself, no one else should possess either. The ‘idea of happiness’ must be driven out.”
We should emphasize here that, unlike antisemitism, antiziganism is a form of “romantic racism” (Wulf D. Hund). One might even consider to what extent “the Gypsy” corresponded far more to the (repressed) notions of happiness held by the masses – at least under Fordism – than “the Jew” did. Much of what is associated with the Gypsy stereotype – the soulful folk song, the fairground, the circus, the “coming and going” – was certainly closer to the feelings of happiness of “ordinary people” in the Fordist phase than the stereotypes regarding Jews, who were imagined as rich and powerful and also stood for a foreign, bourgeois culture, even if the common denominator can be found in the accusation of being “work-shy parasites.” In contrast to other “savages” (Native Americans, South Sea islanders, and so on), who are likewise equated with nature, the “Gypsy,” however, has long been an integral part of the culture and society in which one lives. For this reason, and because – unlike the “Black” person – they cannot be enslaved, they are persecuted; this is linked to the ever-present fear of one’s own descent into “asociality,” a fear of which the “Gypsy” is also a constant reminder.
Homo Sacer and the Gypsies
Giorgio Agamben’s legal-theoretical reflections can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of antiziganism. He is concerned with the relationship between rule and exception: “It is not the exception that eludes the rule; it is the rule that, by suspending itself, gives way to the exception; and the rule establishes itself as a rule by remaining in relation to the exception. The particular ‘force of the law’ derives from this ability to remain in contact with an outside.” Here, the individual is reduced to a mere body, to “naked life,” while it is the sovereign who rules over the state of exception. A decisive role in Agamben’s work is played by the “Homo sacer,” a concept derived from Roman law that gave his book its title. The Homo sacer is an outlaw who falls outside the law (but is precisely for that reason enclosed within it) and can be killed with impunity.
Something similar was expressed in the structures of persecution and internment of modernity, taken to an extreme in Nazism. Agamben sees the state of exception emerging once again today in the disintegration of state organizations, the establishment of camps, and “illegitimate assaults” (such as mass rapes). In such phenomena, which according to Agamben are precisely a fundamental precondition for the law, he sees an omen for the entire world. In these crisis-ridden processes of decay, all are thus potentially homines sacri.
Robert Kurz takes up Agamben’s reflection on the relationship between legal form and exclusion and links it to considerations regarding the “constitution of politics and the economy, of abstract labor and the state apparatus” in modernity. The space of “excluding enclosure, of reduction to naked life” was still called the “house” in early modernity: “The poorhouse, workhouse, prison, asylum, slave house – the ‘houses of horror’ in which, as an example for society as a whole, the training in externally determined abstract labor took place, a process intensified in the camps of the later modernizing and crisis dictatorships. This original state of exception has become the modern normal state that underlies all rule of law.”
The global crisis of the third industrial revolution today differs from earlier crises in that sovereignty itself is beginning to “dissolve, because the space of enclosing exclusion is also dissolving. […] Sovereignty, to the extent that it still exists, reacts reflexively with its customary crisis measures, even though these come to nothing.” Forced labor, low wages, the camp, the management of people, and so on are now being reactivated for the superfluous in the crisis of the working society at a new level of decay. Yet the general threat is expressed in differences in the exclusionary measures and ideologies. Even today, “enclosing exclusion […] takes place in the polarized pattern of racism and anti-Semitism” (Robert Kurz).
These discussions, however, fail to address the specific anti-Gypsy syndrome. Alongside the Jews, it was precisely the “Gypsies” who were not only regarded as foreign in race, but who, over the course of centuries, were repeatedly declared outlaws in the very sense Agamben describes. In modern times, a permanent state of emergency was effectively imposed on Sinti and Roma, insofar as they were constructed as the absolute antithesis to the modern disciplinary process and to “Protestant ethics” within one’s own society. Although the “Gypsies” are “Homines sacri” par excellence, as their history of persecution proves, they are generally forgotten even in critical accounts of racism; and it is precisely in this act of forgetting that the fact is expressed that the “Gypsy” represents, so to speak, the Homo sacer of the Homo sacer. Constructed as the embodiment of “asociality” and “foreignness,” regarded as the “scum of humanity” (as the Enlightenment “Gypsy expert” Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann put it in the 18th century), and thus representing the quintessential cautionary example for the “normal” person: He shows them where they will end up if they do not conform and comply, but instead behave “like the Gypsies.” Even integrated Sinti and Roma are buried under a mountain of stereotypes in everyday life if they “admit” to belonging to this group.
Structural Antiziganism
Quite a few Roma work in the low-wage sector under precarious conditions and/or are dependent on basic social assistance, including the prospect of “forced labor,” as this now increasingly threatens “ordinary” people as well. In the context of the new mass migration, refugees who need “welfare” are already in the classic “Gypsy position.” The problem of “undocumented status” is also already anticipated in anti-Gypsyist policies.
Here, general and specifically anti-Gypsy measures of crisis management intertwine with a mass anti-Gypsy ideology. The more the middle classes face the danger of social decline, the more they recognize themselves in the prototype of the superfluous and outcast in European societies: the “Gypsy.” Just as one can speak of a structural anti-Semitism that manifests itself not least in attacks on the financial markets and in the imagination of a global conspiracy, even when Jews are not mentioned at all, so too can one speak of a structural anti-Gypsyism when, in the fear of one’s own downfall, decline in status, and a slide into antisocial behavior and criminality, the antiziganist stereotype implicitly comes into play, even when “Gypsies” are not mentioned at all. The oscillation between social discrimination and racist exclusion makes the Gypsy stereotype particularly suitable for this purpose.
Structural antiziganism, however, is harder to recognize than structural antisemitism because it is rarely addressed or, at best, treated only marginally. After all, the modern subject would have to recognize itself in the mirror with its Homo Sacer fear. That is why it looks away from the start. On the other hand, it has always known that the “Gypsy” is the “very last,” as surveys show.
Contemporary antiziganism is also a reaction to the massive crises of capitalist collapse. The impending decline of the middle classes is now compounded by galloping inflation, a housing shortage, and so on. Linked to this is the spread of racist ideologies from both “above” and “below” – that is, an “alliance of mob and elite” (Hannah Arendt).
Today’s regressive mainstream left, with its traditional focus on the respectable and decent wage laborer, implicitly targets the so-called lumpenproletariat as the “dregs” of society – and thus also the “Gypsies,” who, in the racist narrative, rank even lower than the “native” lumpenproletariat.
Originally published in Konkret No. 3 in 2026.
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