The internment of Italian Sinti in the province of Modena during fascism: From ethnographic to archival research

Abstract

and is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.The persecution and internment of Gypsies in Fascist Italy is still a topic that has not been addressed either at a historical level or at a political one. During ethnographic research in an Italian Sinti community I collected the first testimonies on their internment, which took place between 1940 and 1943 in a village in the Apennines. To date, their testimonies have not been reported in any historical work, nor have they aroused any interest in cultural institutions responsible for safeguarding the memory of the crimes and persecutions during the fascist regime. In order to support the stories remembered by the Sinti, I used archival material connecting the historiography on civil internment during fascism with the gypsies' parallel internment. This interweaving of ethnographic and archival research has allowed me to shed light on the incongruities and the shortcomings in the documentation on the persecution of the Gypsies in Italy during fascist regime.

Continuities and Discontinuities: Antiziganism in Germany and Italy (1900-1938)

“…The few Italian scholars who have researched Gypsies in interwar Italy do not always take account of the pre-war situation of Italian Gypsies, which is quite understandable given the archival difficulties of researching ANY time period in regard to Italian Gypsies, who, as I noted above, have virtually disappeared from the Italian archival record due to the nature of their categorization. Paola Trevisan has pointed out the continuities in liberal and Italian fascist policy (Trevisan 2013(Trevisan , 2017(Trevisan , 2019. She mentions two 1926 circulars which aimed at only foreign Gypsies, like the prewar circulars.…”

“…It also seems clear that Giuseppe Levakovich's story about the fate of his family largely squares with the changes in Italian policy taking place over the late 1930s. Levakovich's job guarantees him status as an Italian citizen, while his wife and children's unemployment means that they are sent to internment camps (Trevisan 2013).…”

“…The flexibility so important to the liberal system, remained, however, within the totality of the state of exception: "In fact, the lack of specific legislation and the consequent absence of criteria to enable the definition of who was an 'Italian Gypsy' gave the Prefects total liberty in deciding who the police measures should apply to. This situation made it even more difficult to document persecution, and it has increased the memory lapse about the entire event" (Trevisan 2013). The outcome for the Gypsies then, was strikingly similar to the outcome in the liberal state, in that they were effectively "disappeared" from Italian history, but the fascist state changed the positionality of the margin: placing interned Gypsies inside the state, while delegitimizing their claims to citizenship, whereas the liberal executive attempted to physically push Gypsies outside of the state utilizing the "state of exception".…”

„Nomadin-Sein“ im „Dorf der Solidarität“

“…Eine andere Argumentationslinie bietet GiovannaBoursier (1996), die die Frage zu beantworten sucht, ob nicht auch im italienischen faschistischen Kontext von einer rassistisch motivierten Verfolgung gesprochen werden kann (vgl . auchBravi 2007;Trevisan 2013) .100 Karpati greift in ihrer Monografie auch auf Beschreibungen des Lebens der "Zigeuner" in den Tagebucheinträgen des Lagerkommandanten von Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, zurück, ohne sich von diesen zu distanzieren .5 Vor dem Eintritt in das Camp…”