Alexandra Senfft: Ignorierte Opfer. Sinti und Roma kämpfen weiter um die Erinnerung an den NS-Völkermord [Victims ignored. Sinti and Roma continue to fight for remembrance of the Nazi genocide], Forum Wissenschaft (2025) 1, 29-32.
Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and its historical obligations to the Jews has become a largely ritualized part of its political discourse. However, these German commitments apply far less to the other group of victims whom the Nazis sought to exterminate completely, the Sinti and Roma, even though they were disenfranchised and murdered with the same brutal systematicity as the Jews. After the war, there was a long delay in recognizing the genocide against the Porajmos. To this day, they experience racism, exclusion and discrimination, and are usually marginalized in collective commemorations – if they appear at all.
Alexandra Senfft describes the controversy surrounding the memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten, which commemorates the Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazi regime, as a particularly revealing case. It was only in 2012 that it was finally inaugurated, after long institutional resistance and tenaciously stalled on the part of politicians. It was designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan (1930-2021), who created an architectural structure composed of sound, sculpture and nature, surrounded by trees. Since 2020, however, the Senate and Deutsche Bahn have been planning a new S-Bahn line, “S21,” whose second phase of construction will tunnel under the memorial. Originally, the memorial was to be completely demolished and then temporarily removed. In the end, a solution was found that will leave the architecture itself somewhat intact, but it is expected that the surrounding trees, which are an integral part of the concept, will be cut down. For many Sinti and Roma, this is a desecration of the site.
Dani Karavan, who died in 2021, supported the Sinti and Roma protest in 2020, deploring that “the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (opened in 2005) would never have been treated in this way”. Senfft describes how Karavan had already noticed while working on the memorial “that Romani-speaking people were considered second-class victims: ‘As a Jew, I can say that. Nobody is interested in the Sinti and Roma.’” In July 2024, Karavan’s family co-initiated a letter of protest against the S-Bahn line, which was signed by numerous artists and cultural figures. So far, however, it seems that the risks of damage to the memorial are not being taken seriously – although we should probably be glad that things have not turned out even worse.
I find this case particularly interesting for two reasons that are not reflected in the article: First, the Karavan family’s involvement demonstrates a solidarity across victim groups that can be observed in many other contexts. Relatives of Holocaust victims use their positionality to help relatives of Porajmos victims. Even today, Jews and Jewish Israelis stand up for Palestinians; Ukrainians show solidarity with Palestinians, as do Roma; Palestinians show solidarity with Sudanese, and so on. The shared experience of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and threatened or actual genocide gives rise to resistance to attempts by the majority society to pit victim groups against each other and to privilege some over others.
On the other hand, the case also points beyond this. The fact that Dani Karavan was Jewish certainly helped to establish and maintain the memorial for the murdered Sinti and Roma in the German culture of remembrance, and may even have been decisive. But this use of Jewish-Israeli positionality in German remembrance culture is full of ambivalence. Karavan’s first major piece of memorial architecture was a monument to the Palmach Brigade in the Negev Desert near Beersheba, built between 1963 and 1968 – an ensemble of concrete, desert acacia trees, water, and wind chimes. The Palmach was a moderate Zionist paramilitary force that collaborated with the British before the creation of Israel, establishing and defending settlements on the one hand, and fighting the extremist Zionist terrorist organizations of the Irgun on the other. Had the Battle of El Alamein been won and Nazi Germany invaded Palestine, the Palmach would have defended the Jews living there from certain death in the Holocaust. Instead, they fought in the War of Independence against the Arab states and played a key role in the Nakba. In the Negev, where Karavan’s memorial to the Palmach is located, they carried out the ethnic expulsion of the Palestinian Bedouin from their villages; they were given 48 hours to move to Gaza. When Karavan began work on the memorial in 1963, it had been only 15 years since the entire Arab population of Beersheba had been expelled or killed in massacres.
From a narrow anti-Zionist perspective, Karavan’s position and his acceptance of state commissions such as the Palmach memorial might disqualify him from creating a memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma. But I see it differently: I would like to see a holistic examination of these issues of memory politics and memory culture. The memorial in Tiergarten is important to the Roma and Sinti community and is accepted by the victims’ relatives as a place of remembrance – whereas the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, in the words of Paul Spiegel, was always intended to be only “the official memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany” and not a “memorial to the Jews in Germany”. The Roma wish for a respectful, i.e. non-ritualized, non-bureaucratized and non-politicized approach to the memorial must be respected. At the same time, we should reflect on the price that must always be paid for the state’s recognition of the victim’s status in the official culture of remembrance, which in this case is once again being paid by the Palestinians. This is the only way to prevent solidarity between victim groups from becoming exclusive and, in turn, marginalizing others.