"The Gypsy Scourge!" Creation and Implementation of Anti-Gypsy Measures in Czechoslovakia Between 1918 and 1940
Abstract
On February 14, 1927 members of the Czechoslovak Parliament adopted the Act No. 117/1927 against "wandering gypsies and vagabonds alike". It was a law, which drew inspiration from the judicial code of the previous period - the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and also from the recent measures against "vagabonds" and "gypsies" adopted in France (1912) and Bavaria (1926).
The main aim of this Act supposed to be documentation of the persons, whose were defined in general terms as a "wandering gypsies" and "vagabonds alike". More precise definitions of these terms were intentionally left on lower rank offices, which had a wide open field for the assertion of the Act.
The main aim of this project will be, firstly to reconstruct the ways in which the state offices of different ranks - the central offices as well as local low ranks offices - asserted this Act. The key question will be which role in the process of defining the targeting group played the category of race.
The attention will be also focus on other categories and discourses which appear to be relevant for the assertion of the Act such as hygiene and public health, work, criminality, youth care etc. The analysis of diverse sources, besides official records also contemporary expert journals, will transcend the classical periodical frame of the First Czechoslovak Republic and allow me to track the changes in the adoption of the original Act.
On the general level I will focus on the question of historical continuity or discontinuity of anti-gypsy measures since the creation of the First Republic until the first year of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.