Project Details
Projekt
Roma Journalism in the Interwar Period (1918-1939)
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Iulia-Karin Patrut
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463005852
Until now, the prevailing view has been that a recognizable will to articulate the Roma as a political and cultural community only emerged with the civil rights movements from the 1970s onward. The programmatic, self-image, international networking, and literary and artistic reach of Roma journalism in Eastern Europe have not yet been systematically evaluated and have remained unnoticed in German-language research. The SP corrects this view by examining the Roma journalism of the interwar period (1918-1939), with a focus on newspapers and magazines from Romania together with their European relations and references. The aim of the project is to analyze the self-articulations of the Roma in the context of their Eastern European emancipation movement, tracing the ambivalence that existed between artistic and journalistic self-expression on the one hand and state and academic repression on the other - the latter sometimes also being inscribed in the self-articulations, e.g. in the form of compromises. Under investigation are: (1) cultural and political self-articulations of Roma in the entire span of their thematic fields, European references and different positionings, (2) resistant potentials against eliminatory tendencies in science, society and politics, especially in Germany, and (3) artistic contributions between innovation and tradition, Avant-Garde and folklore. The corpus includes the most important newspapers published by Roma in interwar Romania (among others Glasul Romilor [The Voice of the Roma], 1933-1940 and Ţara Noastră [Our Country] 1937) as well as program pamphlets, flyers and speeches from the environment of the most important Roma organizations. Secret service and police surveillance files from July 1919 to September 1944, which summarize and comment on journalistic and political positioning, complete the corpus. Cross-references exist to SPs, which deal with aesthetic media, since Roma journalism includes its own artistic genres, to another SP, since "gypsy lore" is commented on in Roma journalism, and to another SP, since the self-understanding of political self-empowerment stands in the greatest possible contrast to the eliminatory logic that prevails particularly in the German police apparatus. Overarchingly, The SP investigates the European relevance of Roma journalism by exploring, in cooperation with other SPs, the ambivalence of self-articulation/foreign representation with a view to a European history of entanglement that also pays attention to triangulations with other minoritized people.
DFG Programme
Research Units
