This talk concerns the misalignment between different approaches to discussing the persecution of Romany peoples during World War II. After 1945, Romany survivors invested enormous efforts in disputes with the postwar German and Austrian authorities, who insisted that in most cases their treatment during the war had not been motivated by racial but by social or other (security) considerations. Survivors rightly argued that theirs was a community of fate: there were no passes to freedom available for them from 1938–1945.
Alongside, but separately from, these frustrated and frustrating legal battles, academic characterizations of the underlying dynamic of the Nazi regime were also shifting. An early focus on the totalitarian dictatorship and obedience was displaced by a more ethnographically attuned attention to the quiddity of the “Racial State.” This frame allowed for an interest in the enthusiastic uptake of revolutionary Nazi ideas, as well as the recognition of many more victims.
But recent research suggests that race was less a mode of thinking than a convenient and endlessly malleable language of domination. The true character of Nazi social policy arose from the conception of an organic National Community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Romany peoples were anathematized as alien to this community, and “race” provided a rhetoric of justification and exhortation. So, what is at stake when we ask: What does it mean to be racially persecuted?
Michael Stewart, who received his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1988, based on fieldwork he had carried out with Roma in Hungary, began his career as a junior research fellow in Cambridge and by producing documentaries for the BBC. A recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University from 1998-2025, since 2014 he has been a professor of anthropology at University College London (UCL), where he founded both the Open City Documentary Festival and the collaboration between anthropologists and creative practitioners known as “Public Anthropology.” His publications include The Time of the Gypsies (Perseus, 1998).
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will moderate the discussion.
