Neither foreigners nor aliens: the interwoven stories of Sinti and Roma and Black Germans.

The article undertakes a comparative investigation of the diverging histories of two communities of people of color that have been located in Germany for many generations: the Sinti and Roma and the Black Germans. My argument is made against a background of a racialist concept of nation that still exists today and that arose during the German colonial period that continues to be repressed even today--a concept that construes the categories of Germanness and whiteness to be identical. The focuses of my investigation are on both a historical locating of the rejection (Ausgrenzung) and persecution narratives of both communities as well as a history of resistance that is connected to these narratives and that involves the political and cultural self-identification that in recent decades has led to a significant change of perspective. (NLa-S)

To Oscar and Vinzens Rose, who survived the survival.

Some years ago, when I came upon an introductory survey on German cultural studies published in 1995 (Burns) that dealt with cultural historical developments since the 1871 founding of the German nation-state, I was surprised to discover that it contained not a single reference to German colonialism. The term "colonialism" was itself banished from the index. Although the first chapter, "Imperial Germany," covered most of the period during which the German Reich functioned as a colonial power, the authorial collective apparently did not consider this historical fact of any importance for the establishing of imperial concepts of culture and related forms of knowledge production, for it simply erased colonialism from its narration of the German nation.

Here, as in many places, it becomes clear that, despite growing scholarly attention, German colonialism, which formally lasted from 1884 to 1918, still comprises a multilayered constitutive site of forgetting. The almost complete erasure of the colonial epoch from the collective memory of German society, as well as the eradication of the significance of a colonial imagination for the emergence of a national identity and a German discourse on race, are fraught with far-reaching consequences, among others, the failure to grasp the continuity of racist concepts and their relevance for intellectual and cultural complexes of meaning (Zantop 12). (1) The uninterrupted transmission of numerous overtly colonial/racist images and related patterns of thought and perception still evident in today's united Germany contradicts neither the Federal Republic's partial discrediting of a volkisch conception of nation as a result of discussions about National Socialism, nor the rigidly practiced displacement of historical responsibility within the GDR that facilitated the official repression of "problematic" epochs (Behrends, Kuck, and Poutrus 2). This historical and intellectual configuration forms the backdrop for more recent controversial debates on important topics like ethnicity, racism, and migration that, by the mid-nineties, had made their way to Germany. Vis-a-vis the rapidly developing theoretical approaches of critical cultural and postcolonial studies in other European countries and the USA, comparable transnational German debates appear not only belated. Even more problematic is the apparent appropriation of theoretical models and terms in the fields of social sciences and humanities in ways that ignore specific historical and political contexts as well as subaltern perspectives. This is particularly the case, for example, with regard to the concept of hybridity, a term that has been taken up by a number of academic discourses, yet which in its German reception often is reduced to "cultural mixing." As Kien Nghi Ha rightly observes, deploying the concept of hybridity while negating its colonial/racist associations runs the risk of reifying cultural differences along racialized national boundaries (Kien, "Hybride Bastarde" 109), despite the frequent claims of an anti-essentialist approach to cultural difference. Kien maintains that such a dehistoricized (mis)reading is far from coincidental:

 
   The suspicion arises that a critical appropriation of the concept of 
   hybridity in the context of its colonial history has not only been 
   sacrificed to the political unconcious, but is also thought to be 
   irrelevant and undesirable. At the very least, it is remarkable how 
   this historical amnesia and the repression of colonial history in 
   the German reception of postcolonial criticism correlates with a 
   culturalist perspective that conceives hybridity to be above all a 
   sign of social modernization, expanded consumer options, and 
   postmodern aesthetics particularly suited to cosmopolitan and 
   aesthetically sophisticated metropolitan elites (109). 

This postmodern-eurocentric misrepresentation of critical postcolonial approaches must be seen in the context of a German tradition of social consensus that can be traced back to the immediate postwar period. Most Germans, confronted with the shocking magnitude of Nazi racial and extermination policies, responded with a massive repression of racist practices in the collective memory. The result in subsequent years was a lack of even the most basic scholarly vocabulary for describing racist categories and activities (Bielefeld 56-57). A later regression, discernable even in the present, affects not only scholarly discourse. It explains, on the one hand, the continued widespread ignorance about processes of institutional and social discrimination frequently subsumed in Germany under the category of xenophobia (Auslander- oder Fremdenfeindlichkeit)--a trivialization very much at odds with social reality. On the other hand, and closely related to this, the repression of German racism and its colonial past contributes to the reification of the history of migration in Germany to a postwar phenomenon that confirms the carefully cultivated myth of the new beginning, the so-called "Zero Hour" (Kien, Ethnizitat 21). As a consequence, the realities of marginalized groups, whose contradictory and changing presences can be discerned in much earlier periods of German history, disappear once more from view. Hence, discursively interrelated processes of silencing prevent a critical, temporally and spatially located discussion of both the impact of racialized constructions of alienness/foreignness (Fremdheitskonstruktionen) and accompanying hegemonic social and cultural patterns of interpretation deeply rooted in imperial and colonial imaginaries (Kien, Aspekte 5).

These interpretive paradigms affect our understanding not only of postwar migrants in Germany who have lived in Germany for well over a half century; they also have an impact on two communities of color who have lived in Germany for generations: Sinti and Roma (2) and Black Germans. While the ancestors of contemporary Sinti and Roma emigrated from India via Turkey and Greece to German-speaking Central Europe as early as the fifteenth century (Reemtsma 27-28), the presence of Black Germans results from specific relations between Germany and its African colonies that date back to the end of the nineteenth century, during which a scarcely noticed migration from the colonies into the metropoles was initiated and so-called "colonial subjects" transferred their domicile permanently to Germany (Oguntoye 7-8). (3)