Mittwoch, 22. März 2023, 16:00 - 18:00

Romano Centro, Hofmannsthalgasse 2, 1030 Vienna

VWI goes to Romano Centro – Verein für Roma

The lecture will examine the intensity of anti-Jewish and anti-Romani sentiment between the two world wars at the micro level through the analysis of diaries and at the macro level through a quantitative analysis of newspapers. The research will explore the reasons why diarists tended to associate romantic images with Romanies, while negative images were always associated with Jews. Thus, the intensity of Anti-Semitism and Romaphobia was quite different between the two world wars, as both public thought and discourse were clearly anti-Jewish and less anti-Romanies. The aim of this presentation is to attempt to understand the socio-psychological reasons for this divergence. In the second half of the lecture, the transformation and change in intensity of antipathy towards Romanies and Jews will be placed in a broader historical and social context. The aim is to try to understand how the object of hatred has changed from Jew to Gypsy in the present days. In other words, how a society that was clearly anti-Jewish between the two world wars became sharply anti-Romani over the course of two generations.

Commented by Gerhard Baumgartner

Gergely Kunt is a social historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Miskolc, Hungary. He is one of the founding members of the European Ego-Documents Archive and Collections Network (EDAC). He was European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust-Studies; Core Fellow at Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University; Weickart Postdoctoral Fellow at Fritz Bauer Institut at University of Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of the book in English „The Children's Republic of Gaudiopolis: The History and Memory of a Children's Home for Holocaust and War Orphans” and several monographs in Hungarian.

Gerhard Baumgartner is an Austrian journalist and historian. He studied History, English and Ural Studies at the University of Vienna from 1977 to 1984, was project manager at the Austrian Historical Commission from 2000 to 2003 and also managed research projects on the history of the Roma and Sinti and on coming to terms with the Nazi past. Since May 2014, he has been the scientific director of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW). His main research interests include: resistance and persecution between 1938-1945, the history of persecution of the Roma and Sinti, the Republic of Austria's handling of the Nazi past and the history of the national minorities in Burgenland.

Photo credit: 1943, Budapest Vaspálya utca 4., the photo was taken in the yard of the factory of the vehicle manufacturer Lajos Miklós. © Fortepan / Lajos Miklós

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