'The Scourge of Our Countryside!' The Criminalisation of the Roma from the First Republic until the First Phase of the Protectorate (1918-1941)
Abstract
On 22 December 1926, the opening ceremony of the 'Gypsy School' was held in Uzhhorod in Carpathian Ruthenia. The Czech officials speaking at the event drew attention to the educational importance of the institution, which they described as a unique and exceptional 'experiment'. The special school for the children of those inhabitants who were labelled as 'Gypsies' was created in a territory that was annexed to Czechoslovakia after the First World War and that, in the contemporary imagination, embodied a different, 'underdeveloped' area. This reinforced the legitimacy of the First Republic as a democratic, progressive, modern and liberal state belonging to the advanced and civilised West.
More than half a year later, on 14 July 1927, the deputies of the Czechoslovak National Assembly passed Act No. 117/1927 Coll. on Wandering Gypsies. The origin of this legislative rule was related to the interest of the contemporary press and the public in the case of 'Moldovan cannibals', which had been sparked by the accusation of approximately twenty 'Gypsies' from the village of Moldava nad Bodvou in Eastern Slovakia of a large number of thefts, robberies and murders. In contrast to the situation shortly after the end of the First World War, when the central Czechoslovak authorities did not comply with the demands of local state authorities to regulate the 'Gypsy question', and in contrast to most European states, the centre-right government of the so-called Gentlemen's Coalition prepared in 1927 a special law aimed at putting the 'Gypsies' under constant police surveillance and control.
This work discusses the 'Gypsy question', the creation and implementation of anti-Gypsy measures and, last but not least, such practices of the state authorities that were intended to integrate 'Gypsies' into Czechoslovak or Czech society during the First and Second Republics as well as in the first phase of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Individual chapters offer answers to the questions of how the various state authorities - both at the central and especially at the local level - applied not only the Act of 1927 but the whole complex of measures aimed at the population referred to as 'Gypsies'. The present work focuses on the role that the category of 'race', contemporary criminological discourse and symbolic geographies of the East and West in the context of interwar Czechoslovakia played in defining the legislative term 'wandering Gypsies' in practice. The book attempts to define the people influencing the implementation of anti-Gypsy measures and to reconstruct their motivations. It demonstrates that physical violence always formed an integral part of the possible treatment of 'Gypsies' and that various contemporary agents considered it to be entirely legitimate regardless of the current political order.
The analysis presented here goes beyond the traditional milestones of political history. The work reveals particular changes in the criminalisation of 'Gypsies' in the first half of the 20th century while asking more general questions about historical continuities and discontinuities or the nature of individual political regimes. Through the selected topic, it also addresses, on a general level, the question of the relationship between interwar Czechoslovakia and contemporary colonialism.