Vol. 20 · No. 3 · Issue 64 · Fall 2002

Gilad Margalit

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Abstract

This article discusses a screenplay of the television thriller Armer Nanosh (Poor Nanosh), written in 1989[1] by the famous German author Martin Walser and Asta Scheib.[2] The screenplay deals with the relations between Germans and Germany's Sinti, or Gypsy, population in the shadow of Auschwitz,[3] a subject that has hardly been touched upon by postwar German authors and dramatists.

The very thematization of such a topic reflects the deep change that occurred in the 1980s in the Federal Republic's political culture following the civil rights campaign for the Sinti and Roma organized by Gypsy activists, aided by the German civil rights organization Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (Society for Threatened Peoples). By the 1980s, after forty years of official German fluctuation between non-recognition and reluctant recognition of the Sinti and Roma as victims of Nazi persecution, German political culture (but not German society) finally granted the Sinti population a status very similar to that held by Jews after the Holocaust. After that point, portraying the Gypsy as a victim became more common in German political culture. Nanosh, the protagonist in Walser and Scheib's plot, for example, is a Gypsy, a survivor of deportation to Auschwitz who is depicted as a victim rather than a criminal, unlike earlier Gypsy figures in German thrillers and films.[4]