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European History Quarterly

Romani Berlin: ‘Gypsy’ 2022, Vol. 52(4) 532–553

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DOI: 10.1177/02656914221097599
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1890–1933

Eve Rosenhaft
University of Liverpool, UK

Abstract
This article explores the Romani contribution to the construction of urban space(s),
focusing on the city of Berlin between about 1890 and 1933, with a particular emphasis
on the period between the turn of the century and the First World War. Drawing on
press reports, it offers evidence for public awareness of a new Romani presence in
and around the city, and proposes that media representations of ‘Gypsies’ in the new
suburbs reflected the heightened sensitivity to setting boundaries between urban and
rural, civilized and uncivilized, that informed Berlin’s ‘urban imaginary’ at a time of
expansion and modernization. In a second step, the agency of Romani Berliners in defin-
ing the city as a multi-ethnic metropolis and shaping spaces within it is considered. The
account focuses on productive interactions between Romani and non-Romani actors in
the horse markets which drew Sinti and Roma to settle in Berlin and on the lives of
horse-dealing families in the city at large, including the tendential emergence of
‘Gypsy’ neighbourhoods.

Keywords
Berlin, cityspace, horse markets, Sinti and Roma, urban Gypsies

In June 1912, the Berlin police banned ‘Gypsies’ from travelling in groups through
the suburban districts of Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, Neukölln, Wilmersdorf and

Corresponding author:
Eve Rosenhaft, University of Liverpool, UK.
Email: dan85@liverpool.ac.uk
Rosenhaft 533

Stralau.1 The decade that preceded the First World War witnessed an intensification of
anti-Gypsy policies all over Germany, accompanied by a spike in attention to Romani
groups in the press, most of it negative. In the light of this, the Berlin ban appears as
simply another chapter in a long history of discrimination. It can also, however, be
seen as a move in a more complex process of marking a border between the city and
its hinterland, or of defining urban space. This article proposes that the fact of a new
Romani presence in Berlin around the turn of the twentieth century contributed to percep-
tions of the cityscape at a critical point in its development as a modern metropolitan
capital. An exploration of this ‘urban imaginary’2 necessarily emphasizes the perspective
of the non-Romani majority, and that is of course the perspective that is privileged in the
surviving sources, which originate almost entirely with the policing authorities and the
popular press.3 Following an understanding of space as the product of material practices,
actions and performances characterized by ‘articulations of power’,4 however, the arti-
cle’s second purpose is to explore the material agency of Berlin’s Romani inhabitants
in shaping the cityspace and spaces within it. The emergence of identifiable ‘Gypsy’
neighbourhoods, first in the suburbs and then within the historical bounds of the city
itself, was the result of choices and decisions that Sinti and Roma made in response to
changing material and legal circumstances.
The means of pursuing a livelihood that they chose, adapting familiar practices to the
circumstances of the city, meant that the city’s horse markets came to be identified by
Roma and non-Roma as ‘Gypsy’ spaces. In attempting to map a ‘Romani Berlin’ this
article focuses on Romani horse dealers and on the interactions that shaped the space
of the horse market. Living with and dealing in horses has long been an intrinsic part
of the lives of many European Romani communities and households, both settled and
itinerant. Often understood as a rural phenomenon, before widespread motorization the
buying and selling of horses was also key to Romani integration into urban local econ-
omies. Horse markets were part of Berlin’s urban scene and its economic calendar
until the 1930s, and organic points of encounter between Romani and non-Romani
Berliners.
The scholarship on Romani horse dealers has tended to consider the Romani subjects
in their relation to themselves, each other and the market, drawing conclusions about how
economic practices express and enact Roma identities or (re)situating increasingly ‘niche’

1
Berliner Tageblatt (BT), 31 May 1912.
2
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Introduction’, in Andreas Huyssen, ed., Other Cities, Other Worlds (Durham, NC 2008),
1–23.
3
On the source challenges in Romani history, see most recently Elisabeth Tauber and Paola Trevisan, ‘Archive
and Ethnography – the Case of Europe’s Roma and Sinti (19th–21st centuries): An Introduction’, La Ricerca
Folklorica, Vol. 74 (2019), 4–12. In the case of this project, the problem was amplified by working under
the conditions of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, which meant that the present study rests to a con-
siderable extent on a relatively fortuitous selection of digitized print sources.
4
Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2000), 433–52 (here 441). See also Doreen
Massey, For Space (London 2005); Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (London 2004); John-David
Dewsbury, ‘Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference’, Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2000), 473–96.
534 European History Quarterly 52(4)

‘Gypsy economies’ in relation to the logic of the wider market economy.5 Here, I con-
sider evidence for productive interactions. During the period covered by this article,
the horse trade was a vital part of the economy, and Romani people made their own con-
tribution to an ethnically segmented market. But the market space itself was one in which
that segmentation was manifested as cultural interaction and exchange between members
of a majority population and people positioned in wider cultural discourses as stigmatized
outsiders. In many parts of Germany, the horse trade was dominated by members of
another ethnic minority, Jews. Accordingly, the most sophisticated historical work ana-
lyzing market transactions in terms of the dynamic balance of trust and suspicion between
ethnic insiders and outsiders has focused on relations between Jewish livestock dealers
and their customers.6 Here, I explore the distinct but analogous interactions between
Romani and non-Romani Berliners, giving close attention to what happened at the
horse market.
There, interactions were structured by the asymmetry of information which is intrinsic
to every market situation. Sellers know more about their wares than buyers, and this is a
particularly acute problem with horses: each one is a unique exemplar of any one of a
wide variety of different breeds, and in the formal market situation the only checks on
fraud were the veterinary examination at the gate and the possibility of the appeal to
law afterwards. The performance that this required of both buyer and seller implied the
flattening or even reversal of power relations, as each party demonstrated his own com-
petence and acknowledged the competence of the other. The dialogue might be coloured
by the buyer’s underlying wariness of the ‘Gypsy’ (who, as seller, had the upper hand)
but would never have taken place if he had actually accepted the public stereotype of
Romani horse dealers as cheats and thieves. The transactions which I describe in detail
below do not differ substantially from negotiations between non-Romani horse dealers
in Germany.7 In this sense, the focus on market interactions reveals spaces in which
equal agency, mutual respect and intercultural competence were on display.
At the same time, the horse market which brought buyers and sellers together was one
of the spaces in which the multi-ethnic character of the wider society became visible and
audible. This article traces how in Berlin horse markets were both associated with and
attracted a new Romani presence. Beyond the market spaces or representations of
them, figures of Romani men and women became part of the conversation about the

5
Leo Lucassen, ‘En men nomde hen zigeuners’: De geschiedenis van Kaldarasch, Ursari, Lowara en Sinti in
Nederland: 1750–1944 (Amsterdam 1990), 138–47; Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, CO
1997), 141–63; Colin Clark, ‘“Not Just Lucky White Heather and Clothes Pegs”: Putting European Gypsy
and Traveller Economic Niches in Context’, in Steve Fenton and Harriet Bradley, eds, Ethnicity and
Economy: ‘Race and Class’ Revisited (New York 2002), 183–98; Micol Brazzabeni et al., eds, Gypsy
Economy: Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century (Oxford 2016).
6
Stefanie Fischer, Ökonomisches Vertrauen und antisemitische Gewalt. Jüdische Viehhändler in Mittelfranken
1919–1939 (Göttingen 2014). For studies in Romani history that reflect on horse trading interactions, see
Angelika Albrecht, Zigeuner in Altbayern 1871–1914 (Munich 2002), 280–1; Miika Tervonen, ‘Gypsies’,
‘Travellers’ and ‘Peasants’: A Study on Ethnic Boundary Drawing in Finland and Sweden, c.1860–1925
(PhD dissertation, European University Institute Florence, 2010), 115–21.
7
Henrik Egbert, ‘The Culture of a Market: A Case Study of Open-Air Horse Markets’, Journal of Institutional
and Theoretical Economics, Vol. 163 (2007), 493–502.
Rosenhaft 535

shape of urban space itself as Berliners undertook a self-conscious programme of mod-

ernization and expansion. They were also drawn into a process of acknowledging and
mapping the diversity of the city’s population in terms not only of class but of ethnicity,
revisioning the cityscape in ethnic or racial terms as successive new populations arrived
and came to be associated with particular areas of the city.8 The article begins by setting
out the impact of these developments on Berlin’s imagined cityscape before turning to the
evidence of how ‘Romani spaces’ were shaped from within by Sinti and Roma them-
selves in interaction with (their) Others. In other European cities in the twenty-first
century, the phrase Gypsy Urban Area (GUA) denotes a lived reality as well as an
object of policy, and recent scholarship that brings together studies of ‘urban Gypsies’
with analyses of the racialization of urban space offers a lens through which to explore
the confluence of real changes in Romani lives and lifestyles and the growth of a metro-
politan area.9 If in these terms what is observable in Berlin in the early twentieth century
seems barely more than a tendency, our picture of ‘Romani Berlin’ a sketch-map at best,
then its blank spaces need to be understood in part as artefacts of the ‘absent presence’
that characterizes the archival record in Romani history,10 an absence compounded by
the fracturing of local memory in Berlin.

Berlin at the Turn of the Century: Media Landscape and Urban

Identity
During the years under consideration here, Berlin was embarked on a series of moves that
extended its jurisdiction and drew new outlying communities into the rapidly developing
regime of physical and administrative urbanism. This would culminate in the formation
of Greater Berlin in 1920. While retaining the formal status of independent towns,
Charlottenburg accepted the jurisdiction of the Berlin city government and its police reg-
ulations in 1877, Spandau in 1887 and Schöneberg in 1898; Neukölln-Rixdorf joined
them in 1899 and Wilmersdorf in 1906. In 1908, visions of expansion and rationalization
were mobilized in the launch of the Greater Berlin Competition (Wettbewerb
Groß-Berlin), which ran until 1910. The competition invited schemes for reconstructing
the historic city centre, stopping the uncontrolled building of high-density housing and
making space for parks, introducing garden villages in the suburbs, and improving mobil-
ity with public transport and a system of major traffic arteries. Starting in 1912, a
‘Zweckverband Groß-Berlin’ (Greater Berlin Administrative Union) took these planning
issues forward. By 1914, the planning jurisdiction of the city of Berlin had extended to
cover most of the area we now recognize as Berlin, including significant suburban and

8
Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Barbara John and Eckart Birnstiel, eds, Von Zuwanderern zu Einheimischen. Hugenotten,
Juden, Böhmen, Polen in Berlin (Berlin 1990); Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making
and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community 1884–1960 (Cambridge 2013).
9
See most recently: Giovanni Picker, Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in
Urban Europe (Abingdon 2017).
10
Jodie Matthews, ‘Where are the Romanies? An Absent Presence in Narratives of Britishness’, Identity
Papers: A Journal of British and Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2015), 79–90.
536 European History Quarterly 52(4)

rural spaces: 59 settlements still designated rural communities (Landgemeinden) and 27

landed estates (Gutsbezirke).11
The question of where the city ended and the countryside began was thus acutely present
in imaginings of Berlin and of the kind of urban space it was destined to become. Peter
Fritzsche described some aspects of these imaginings in his 1996 study Reading Berlin
1900. The book is based on a survey of the newspaper press which saw an explosive
growth in the same period and whose leading proponents, Ullstein, Scherl and Mosse,
made Berlin into the media as well as the political capital of the German Empire at its con-
fident peak. Fritzsche’s proposition is that the new city and the new medium made each
other, and among the key themes he identifies is that of the suburb, or Vorstadt. In his
account the Vorstadt has positive connotations – the new opportunities to be seized by first-
generation incomers, the ‘forward movement’ of the expanding city – and embodies a
microcosm of the metropolis.12 In these general terms, Fritzsche is a persuasive guide to
the imaginative formation of the Berlin cityscape. However, his vision of the Vorstadt
focuses on the working-class suburbs and is strongly coloured by the celebration of
forms of white working-class domesticity that were a cliché in Berlin popular culture.
Attention to the representation of Sinti and Roma draws the eye to the totality of the subur-
ban space, middle-class as well as proletarian, and to the fact that the city’s claims on the
Vorstadt were contestable.

Urban Horse Markets and the Creation of the ‘Gypsy Village’

Weißensee
Planning for the growth of the city involved thinking about the supply of horses. An official
survey of 1900 showed that there were 51,000 horses in Berlin; in addition to some 4400
maintained by the army, these included horses owned by individuals for leisure and sport-
ing purposes and above all working animals employed in public and private transport.
However, as the Berlin City Assembly was reminded in 1902, the city itself had no
public horse market.13 Instead, Berliners relied on markets held in Charlottenburg,
Spandau and Weißensee. The demand was such that smaller, private markets continued
to pop up in the city and the suburbs, and individuals could also buy and sell from their
own premises.14 But the proposal to open a municipal horse market in Rixdorf underlined
the tension between visions of the modern city and the life of the market. It was prompted
by reports from a private market that had recently been opened on the edge of a space
planned for a public park:

11
Michael Erbe, ‘Berlin im Kaiserreich’, in Wolfgang Ribbe, ed., Geschichte Berlins, Vol. 2 (Munich 1987),
691–792, here 741–53.
12
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA 1996), esp. 115–26.
13
Vorlagen für die Stadtverordnetenversammlung Berlin (VSVOV) 1903, 8. The last horse-drawn streetcar line
in Berlin closed in August 1902.
14
For examples of private markets: Friedenauer Lokal-Anzeiger (FLA) 20 July and 22 August 1910; Gerd
v. Ende, Berliner Hufgeklapper: Pferde als Spiegel der Vergangenheit (Hamburg 2020); photographs in
Landesarchiv Berlin (LABln), F Rep 90, II,12 051 and 12 052 and 291107 respectively.
Rosenhaft 537

A horse market with its noise and coming and goings has no place in a district for whose
development the city only recently made considerable sacrifices and is committed to
further expenditure. It cannot be conducive to the planning of the area around Körner
Park and associated housing developments to have horse markets being held there.15

Accordingly, Berlin’s largest regular horse markets moved to and remained at the
edges of the expanding city (see Figure 1). The first market in Charlottenburg, for
example, started on one of the main thoroughfares in the 1850s, but moved twice to
more open spaces on the edge of the district. The site in use from 1906 to 1937 was
north of the Spree and bounded by two canals, an area which is still open space
devoted to allotment gardens.16 The Spandau market, in operation until 1929, stood on
a site to the west of the Havel River which was still undeveloped at the turn of the
century.17
The largest and best known of the horse markets in the Berlin area was the one in
Weißensee, northeast of the city boundaries. The plan for its creation began in 1881,
when it was observed that a private market held on the grounds of Weißensee Palace
was very successful. The new market covered four hectares in Neu-Weißensee, an exten-
sion of the historic settlement that had newly laid-out streets but few houses when the
market went into operation in 1885. By 1902, it was being held 24 times a year, with
an average presence of 1400 horses.18
Almost from its beginnings, the Weißensee market was associated with Romani horse
dealers and with a new and intriguing ‘Gypsy’ presence in the environs of Berlin; by 1914,
the connection was so well known that it had reportedly become common for Romani men
and women to name Weißensee as their home irrespective of where they actually came
from.19 In 1901, the regional newspaper that covered Weißensee reported that ‘Gypsies’
had become a permanent feature at horse markets since numbers of them had started settling
down in the area: ‘They often come in large troupes and in some places they dominate the
trade in medium- and low-grade material … Their offensive behaviour has led to repeated
complaints from native horse dealers’ – complaints that testify to the skills of Romani
dealers and their prowess on the market. The response of the police authorities was to
restrict entry to the markets to dealers who were in possession of the most expensive
kind of trading licence. In a rhetorical hostage to fortune, a reporter declared, ‘The
Gypsies’ booming trade in horses is over for the foreseeable future’.20

15
Belege zu den Sitzungen der Stadtverordnetenversammlung (Rixdorf), Sitzung 24.11.1910, LABln, A Rep
044-02–32, 178–79.
16
Wilhelm Gundlach, Geschichte der Stadt Charlottenburg I (Berlin 1905), 453; Erster Verwaltungsbericht der
neuen Stadtgemeinde Berlin für die Zeit vom 1. Oktober 1920 bis 31. März 1924 (Berlin 1926), H. 15:
Verwaltungsbezirk Charlottenburg, 64.
17
FLA, 5 April and 11 October 1908; Erster Verwaltungsbericht, H. 16 Spandau, 47; Berliner Volkszeitung
(BVZ), 17 September 1929.
18
Bericht über die Gemeinde-Verwaltung von Neu-Weißensee pro 1. April 1880/1886 (Neu-Weißensee 1886),
21–22; VSVOV 1903, 8.
19
‘Zigeunerromantik in Berlin’, BT, 2 April 1914.
20
Zeitung für Nieder-Barnim (ZNB), 3 July 1901.
538 European History Quarterly 52(4)

Figure 1. Romani Berlin 1905–1916 showing sites of the principal horse markets (black) and
occasional private ones (grey), the 1910 Mission, and locations of Romani residences and
businesses. The cross-hatched area represents the built area of Berlin (without incorporated
municipalities and suburbs) covered by Straube’s 1910 map. (Map: Emily Smith; Straube Map
Wikimedia commons).

While Romani settlement in Weißensee seems to have dissipated by about 1905, they
remained a presence at the horse market. On 1 April 1933, the Weißensee District authorities
took over the direct administration of the market, at the same time reducing the area it
covered; officially explained by falling demand for its services, this has been interpreted
by local historians as intended to shut out the Sinti and Roma who continued to dominate
the market space.21 It is possible that they had become numerically more dominant as motor-
ization did, after all, render the market increasingly marginal, and their visibility all the more
problematic as the city had by now engulfed Neu-Weißensee. But the date of the takeover is
not insignificant in this context: it was the day of the first nationwide boycott of Jewish
businesses.
The Weißensee and Charlottenburg horse markets were formally shut down at the
beginning of 1937.22 This measure, too, can be seen as part of the crackdown on the
Romani presence and way of life that intensified from 1936 onwards. In Prussia that

21
Joachim Bennewitz, ‘Pferdemarkt und ‘Zigeunerdorf’’, posted online in kiez-im-netz 24 March 2003, print
copy provided by Beate Boehnisch, Bezirksmuseum Pankow. Bennewitz cites the Berliner Nordost Zeitung as
the source.
22
Amtliche Nachrichten des Polizei-Präsidiums in Berlin, 19 February 1937.
Rosenhaft 539

involved intensified police surveillance of horse markets and the exclusion of Sinti and
Roma from those that could not be closed down, and in Berlin the first removals to the
internment camp in Marzahn.23 The extent to which the market was embedded in
Berliners’ imaginations at the point when it was closed down is suggested by an official
announcement issued on 23 February 1937: ‘To answer any remaining uncertainty in
interested circles about the fate of the Weißensee horse market, we hereby point out
again that the horse market is … closed with effect from 1 January 1937’.24
Public fascination with the Romani presence in Weißensee was reflected during the 1890s
and beyond in the figure of the ‘wealthy Gypsy’, embodied in a new celebrity figure. The
focus of media reports was a certain Petermann, variously given the title King or Captain
of the ‘Gypsies’. In 1891, the local press reported that the Petermanns had settled in
Weißensee, purchasing a property adjacent to the horse market and opening a horse-shearing
business nearby.25 In the following years, Petermann featured in reports of two prosecutions,
one against him and his wife for child-snatching while the family was camping in Rixdorf and
one against his mother and brother for creating a public nuisance when refusing to leave a
tavern near the Weißensee horse market.26 An 1897 newspaper report read:

The prosperity of the Gypsies who have their domicile in Weißensee and foray out from here
in all directions, mainly to visit the horse markets, is noticeably increasing … [The] adults
indulge in extreme luxury. The women wear extravagant gold jewellery and are expensively
dressed after their own fashion. Wherever the Gypsies turn up they organize huge binges
where plenty of wine is drunk. The Captain pays every penny of the bill, which often
amounts to hundreds of Marks. Petermann himself has bought a carriage with a glass roof
and silver fittings, in which he drove through Spandau on Thursday at the head of his
company.27

Petermann’s notoriety was such that at a society masked ball in February 1898 guests
appeared costumed as the ‘Captain of the Gypsies’ and his wife.28 Reportedly expelled
from Weißensee by the police in November 1897, in 1904 he was said to be purchasing
a rural estate 20 km east of Berlin as a residence for himself and his wife, ‘the daughter of
a respectable citizen of Köpenick’.29 As late as 1907 he featured in a spread on the
Charlottenburg horse market in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. The photo of a portly,
moustached man, respectably clad in greatcoat and homburg hat and holding a riding

23
Patricia Pientka, Das Zwangslager für Sinti und Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Alltag, Verfolgung und
Deportation (Berlin 2013). On the surveillance of horse fairs: ‘Bekämpfung der Zigeunerplage’ (Runderlaß
des Reichs- und preußischen Ministerium des Innern vom 6.06.1936), Ministerialblatt für die Preußische
Innere Verwaltung, I, 27 (17 June 1936), 785. On the exclusion of ‘Gypsies’ and Jews: Chicago Tribune, 7
July 1938.
24
Amtsblatt für die Reichshauptstadt Berlin, 7 March 1937, 153.
25
ZNB, 24 January 1891.
26
Amtsblatt Ratzeburg, 11 July 1893; Indiana Tribüne, 25 May 1892.
27
ZNB, 10 October 1897.
28
FLA, 1 March 1898.
29
ZNB, 11 November 1897; Märkische Volkszeitung, 2 December 1904.
540 European History Quarterly 52(4)

crop and walking stick, was accompanied by a similarly stereotype-challenging text: ‘The
Gypsies play a special role there, chief among them their well-known captain Petermann,
who is particularly respected as a dealer in and connoisseur of horses’.30
It remains unclear whether there was a single individual behind these stories. In two of
the press reports he features as Joseph. Other accounts refer to men with different names
‘known as Petermann’.31 In the absence of material certainty about his identity we can (at
least) place him in a tradition of mythical bandit kings in which ‘Gypsies’ had a place of
their own.32 But even as an icon he is of interest for his movements: Rixdorf, Weißensee,
Spandau and northern Charlottenburg, places of licensed horse dealing, also mark the
spaces in the north and east where the open roads and villages of Berlin’s hinterland
met the open borders of an expanding city.

‘Gypsies’ on the Frontiers of the New Berlin

From the 1890s, and with increasing intensity after 1900, the popular press registered a
heightened public awareness of a Romani presence not only in Weißensee, but in the city
of Berlin itself. Reflecting actual changes in settlement patterns, which are discussed
below, reports focused respectively on the gentrifying south-central fringes of the
metropolis and the expanding proletarian north, each presented as a kind of frontier. In
the southern suburbs, as the 1912 ban on travelling in groups cited at the beginning of
this article suggests, ‘Gypsies’ appear as inherently out of place, as marauders or invaders
from the countryside in areas which were developing as districts of middle-class housing
and which lay between the rural hinterland and Berlin’s fashionable ‘West End’. The
local newspaper for Friedenau reported periodically on the appearance in the main
streets of travelling families, sometimes specifically identified as coming from Steglitz
to the southwest.33 Increasingly, the citywide press featured stories about Romani
women turning up in shopping areas nearer the centre. Typically, they are represented
as feigning respectability, pretending to shop, sometimes ‘disguised’ as ordinary
women, to cover their real purpose of pickpocketing, swindling unsuspecting shop assis-
tants or stealing from the till.34 A report of 1912 – whose author could not deny that the
women in question were well provided with cash and ready to pay for goods once they
had haggled the price down – described them as ‘children of the Puszta’ visiting
Friedenau, Steglitz, Wilmersdorf and Schöneberg from their ‘wagon fort’ (Wagenburg)
in the southwest.35 If the reference to the Puszta, a recurrent cliché, invokes wide open

30
Die Woche 9 (1907), No. 20 (18 May), 886.
31
E.g. Hamburger neueste Zeitung, 20 July 1906.
32
Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner (Berlin 2011); David Mayall, Gypsy Identities 1500–
2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London 2004).
33
FLA, 8 December 1904, 29 November 1898, 17 July 1899, 20 June 1900, 15 October 1901, 15 May 1911.
34
FLA, 12 December 1904 and 19 November 1907 (Schöneberg), 14 January 1910 (Kantstraße,
Charlottenburg/Wilmersdorf); Deutsche Tageszeitung (DT), 7 October 1905 (Kreuzberg) and 29 July 1906
(central business district); BT, 25 May 1910 (Kurfürstendamm).
35
FLA, 14 April 1912.
Rosenhaft 541

spaces and marauders from the East, the term Wagenburg has echoes of the recent colo-
nial wars in South West Africa and also of the American Wild West.36
Journalists who looked in the opposite direction focused increasingly on the territory north
of Wedding. Wedding was a working-class area abutting on the less salubrious parts of the
old centre; its character marked by the presence of new industries, much of it was already
densely settled by the end of the nineteenth century. To the north, in Gesundbrunnen and
Reinickendorf, stretched main roads and side streets that were still awaiting the housing
and businesses for which they were planned. Buildings old and new alternated with construc-
tion sites and still-waste land. Further north was a hinterland of open spaces. In February 1908
a journalist for the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag reported on his visit to a ‘Gypsy camp’
‘beyond Gesundbrunnen, where the streets meet the open fields’. He described families
living in a farmyard in houses and caravans ‘in the same way as when they were still
roaming the countryside’. Among other curious visitors from the city, the reporter was the
only one (he claimed) to venture beyond the fence into this alien territory in search of a
woman to read his palm – while others parried the sales pitches of the Romani men
looking to sell horses and violins.37 This vision of a sub-proletarian frontier was mobilized
between 1910 and 1914 by press reports of a pitched battle between Romani families and
its aftermath, the ‘battle of the Gypsies in Koloniestraße’: on 17 November 1910 a property
in Koloniestraße (Wedding/Gesundbrunnen) inhabited by a group of Romani families ‘who
make their living as horse dealers and musicians’ was attacked by members of other Romani
families. Shots were fired, the police were called and four men were arrested for disorderly
conduct, their prosecutions stretching over three and a half years. Reporters who speculated
inconclusively about the reasons for the fight named nearby addresses in Gesundbrunnen and
two streets in the eastern central district Friedrichshain as the home territory of other members
of the family and their attackers.38
The vision of ‘Gypsies’ as uncivilized and uncivilizable was of course embedded in
German culture by the nineteenth century.39 The anxiety that rural disorder and animal
energies were penetrating into the heart of urban modernity is signalled in 1906
reports about a group of Roma who had taken up residence in the Roßstraße. This was
in a neighbourhood at the eastern end of Berlin’s central island, where two- to four-storey
buildings dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century housed small businesses
and specialty shops as well as a small working-class population. Amid reports of the new-
comers’ over-conspicuous conviviality, the press highlighted their commercial activities:

36
On the colonial roots and resonances of the policing of ‘Gypsy’ spaces, see Giovanni Picker, Margaret
Greenfields and David Smith, ‘Colonial Refractions: The “Gypsy Camp” as a Spatio-Racial Political
Technology’, City, Vol. 19 (2015), 741–52.
37
J. J., ‘Zigeuner-Lager in Berlin’, Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, 20 February 1908. For a similar account of life
‘on the periphery of the metropolis’: Walter Tiedemann, ‘Neues von den Zigeunern’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 8
January 1913.
38
BVZ, 18 and 22 November 1910, 22 March 1914; Berliner Börsenzeitung (BBZ), 18 November 1910; BT, 18
November 1910, 7 December 1912, 22 March 1914; Vossische Zeitung (VZ), 18 November 1910.
39
Verena Meier, ‘“Neither Bloody Persecution Nor Well Intended Civilizing Missions Changed Their Nature or
Their Number”: A Postcolonial Approach to Protestant “Zigeuner” Missionary Efforts’, Critical Romani
Studies, Vol. 1 (2018), 86–112.
542 European History Quarterly 52(4)

‘They are completely relaxed about carrying on the horse trade there, putting the horses
through their various paces in Roßstraße and Schornsteinfegergasse in defiance of the
traffic’.40 This group of Roma was not allowed to stay long, but as more permanent set-
tlements developed the term Zigeunerquartier emerged to capture a new category of
urban space in the body of the city. The locations mentioned in the press coverage of
the Koloniestraße incident had already acquired this label, and they recur in the
context of more and less sympathetic reports of criminal disorder, squalid living condi-
tions and disease as well as efforts by municipal and private landlords explicitly to
deny ‘Gypsies’ access to rented property.41
It is thus possible to trace a development in the urban imaginary of Berlin around the turn
of the century in which the Romani presence appears to threaten the still-fragile distinctions
between urban and rural, orderly and disorderly, civil/ized and uncivil/ized on which the
image of the modern city rested, and to do so by testing the boundary and buffer spaces con-
stituted by the new suburbs. At the imaginative level, of course, this drawing of attention to
the boundaries served to confirm those distinctions. At the same time, the increasing visibility
of Romani settlement, first in the Weißensee suburb and then within the bounds of the city,
was articulated in terms of a racialized division of interior space – the ‘Gypsy neighbourhood’
– with attendant implications for policing and control. In this sense, the fact of the Romani
presence itself contributed to the discursive shaping of the Berlin cityscape, but the discourse
was largely beyond the control of the Romani actors. They were not, however, without
agency in this process, and in the following section I turn to the evidence for the materiality
of Romani life in the new Berlin, their willed actions and the resources they called on in
shaping their own spaces.

Romani Spaces
The spheres of action of Sinti and Roma in Berlin around the turn of the century were
shaped by a confluence of cultural and political developments. One was the preoccupation
of the Berlin planners and public with the city’s ‘physiognomy’ (Fritzsche), manageability
and policeability, which I have outlined above. A specifically municipal concern, this was
nevertheless related to Berlin’s unique status as the capital of a nation state that was learning
to feel its commercial and military power and their consequences for life at home. These
included a heightened defensiveness about national space. Conflicts over the management
of the African colonies which Germany had acquired in the 1880s, including debates over
the genocidal counter-insurgencies in Southwest and East Africa (1904–1908) and the
rights and status of colonial immigrants, added a layer of racial anxiety to concerns
about migration.42 Since the mobility of Sinti and Roma constituted a permanent challenge

40
Friedenauer Lokal-Anzeiger, 6 August 1906.
41
Zigeunerquartier: BBZ, 10 March 1908 (Johl’scher Weg/Bellermannstraße); Deutscher Kurier, 1 August
1914 (Reinickendorf – also uses the term Zigeunerviertel); FLA, 18 July 1920 (Grüner Weg 11); police
report on August Fischer 1914, LABln, A Pr Br Rep 030 Nr. 2100, no. 31 (Kleine Markusstraße). On exclusion
efforts: VZ, 30 May 1908 (landlords in Rixdorf organizing to prevent rentals); VSVOV 1916, 519 (sale of a muni-
cipal property in a development area agreed on condition that the buyer be bound not to rent to ‘Gypsies’).
42
Geoff Eley and Bradley Naranch, eds, German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC 2015).
Rosenhaft 543

to the integrity of national borders, they were caught in a transnational spiral of policing
measures that gave a new quality and intensity to the discrimination that they had suffered
over five hundred years. In Germany, a panic among regional police and politicians about
the ‘Gypsy nuisance’ came to a head. Calls for radical measures of elimination emerged
alongside repeated renewals of such policies as were actually within the powers of govern-
ments that had not abandoned the rule of law; the key levers available to the authorities
were the policing of nationality status and the system of licensing traders.43
In February 1906, the Prussian Interior Ministry issued a decree which aimed to con-
solidate existing measures against the Romani presence and their mobility. Under its
terms, foreign ‘Gypsies’ were to be refused entry to the territory and expelled if they
were found in Prussia. Those who could demonstrate that they were citizens of one of
the states of the German Empire were to be forced to settle down if possible. Every
effort should be made to avoid issuing identity papers and or licences to trade. The
key preconditions for licensing were proof that the applicant had ‘a dwelling under cir-
cumstances that give evidence of an intention to remain indefinitely’ and that their chil-
dren were continuously attending school. Where there was evidence of neglect, children
were to be removed from their parents and placed in care.44
Anecdotal evidence suggests that this measure prompted some Romani families to seek to
establish permanent residence, sometimes by buying property, and others to leave Germany
permanently or temporarily.45 A reporter for Berlin’s liberal Vossische Zeitung, writing in
October 1906, thought the police pressure explained the appearance of a ‘Gypsy colony’ –
a cluster of families whose children were just settling into the local schools – in the area
around Seestraße on the outer edge of Wedding.46 The new Romani presence is signalled
among other things in the Berlin City Mission’s establishment of an outpost dedicated to
the Gypsies in an apartment just north of Seestraße in 1910. Two years later the mission
opened its own premises about two kilometres to the west on the Rehberge, and this says
something about the continuing instability and liminality of Romani settlement.
Transformed into a city park after the First World War, in 1912 the Rehberge was an undevel-
oped stretch of dunes and forest ‘a long way out’,47 where the Mission could engage with
Romani families while avoiding conflict with non-Romani neighbours. Nevertheless, from
about the middle of the 1900s there is evidence for a Romani population resident in the
city or regularly returning over more than one generation, basically settled though often trav-
elling in the spring and summer months.48 In the spring of 1914, a Berliner Tageblatt

43
Rainer Hehemann, Die ‘Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens’ im Wilhelminischen Deutschland und in der
Weimarer Republik, 1871–1933 (Frankfurt a.M. 1987); Jennifer Illuzzi, Gypsies in Germany and Italy 1881–
1914: Lives Outside the Law (London 2014).
44
Anweisung zur Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens vom 16. Februar 1906 (Berlin 1906).
45
For reports on attempts by Sinti and Roma to buy property to establish settlement: DT, May–June 1906 and 13
April 1907; BT, 11 September 1906.
46
VZ, 1 October 1906. Cf Simon Constantine, Sinti and Roma in Germany (1871–1933). Gypsy Policy in the
Second Empire and Weimar Republic (London 2020), 109–10.
47
BT, 7 July 1012. Constantine, Sinti and Roma, 110–12, provides a concise account of the Mission.
48
Among those families we may include the Ansins, Lauenburgers and Thormanns whose residence in
Gesundbrunnen was registered as early as 1908 and vividly recorded in Alex Wedding’s novel Ede und
544 European History Quarterly 52(4)

correspondent reported that a Romani informant estimated that there were about 300 Sinti and
Roma living in Berlin; the reporter proposed that this meant a presence of some 1800 over the
course of a year, given that some households or their members were transient or seasonal.49
Press reports often acknowledged that within the city Sinti and Roma generally main-
tained legal tenancies, signing leases or contracts for premises of whatever quality they
could afford, and paying the rent punctually. This is confirmed by other sources,
which also give evidence of a variety of housing circumstances. In an echo of the
Petermann story, the press reported in 1905 on the real estate dealings of Franz
Strauss, aka ‘Captain Watusch’. He had sold a property in Halle in order to move into
a villa in Adlershof, a fast-developing residential suburb to the southeast of Berlin,
where he accommodated the caravans of a wider circle of friends and family in his
garden and carried on a brisk trade in horses.50 An article of April 1906, observing
that ‘whole Gypsy caravans’ could be seen moving into the north of the city in the
wake of the new police measures, noted that they tended to occupy newly built tenements
at low rents.51 At the far end of the spectrum, Sinti and Roma were registered at sites
whose character meant that they lived in their own caravans parked on open ground,
but even there they held leases or contracts. Where it was reported that ‘Gypsy’ families
were living in overcrowded, squalid and unsanitary conditions, there were always land-
lords who could be held liable for improvements or who had to buy them out if
the neighbours complained (as was the case with the Roßstraße horse dealers).52
Typically, it was the responsibility of a male head of household to complete the rental
agreement with a landlord. In these transactions they appeared as respectable
Berliners, though when the residence was in a neighbourhood where they could expect
to be unwelcome, Romani renters might have recourse to non-Romani friends to
‘front’ the arrangement.53
One contemporary source that allows some insight into the everyday lives of Roma and
Sinti in Berlin in these years is the files of the Berlin police on applications for licences to
trade.54 The evidence for the nature of the applicants’ business and their lifestyle on which
the issuance of a licence depended was often provided by the precinct police. In many
cases these files can be supplemented and corroborated by entries in the Berlin city directory
– and for both sources it should be emphasized that the Sinti and Roma who are named there
are there because of their intention to carry on business legally. These sources confirm the

Unku (Berlin 1931). See also Reimar Gilsenbach, Oh Django, sing deinen Zorn (Berlin 1993); Janko
Lauenberger and Juliane von Wedemeyer, Ede und Unku – die wahre Geschichte (Gütersloh 2018).
49
‘Zigeunerromantik in Berlin’.
50
Berliner Morgenpost, 3 September 1905.
51
Berliner Zeitung, 2 April 1906. They were thus very likely among Berlin’s proletarian Trockenwohner, to
whom developers notoriously offered a rent discount in return for the service of helping fresh plaster to dry
with their body heat.
52
VZ, 24 August 1906. On the responsibility of landlords in cases of sub-standard conditions: BBZ, 10 March
1908.
53
‘Zigeunerromantik in Berlin’.
54
The file is LABln, A Pr Br Rep 030 Nr. 2100. Reference is made below to nos. 14 (Steinbach), 49 (Schopper),
16 (Strauss), 4 (Otto), 8 (Rose).
Rosenhaft 545

press reports that before 1914 such households were mainly settled in two areas outside the
centre (see Figure 2). The first was the northern suburbs described above: an arc that extended
from the northwest edge of Wedding (Seestraße running broadly east-west on the border and
Müllerstraße, a traffic artery which led northwards out of the city) through the parts of
Reinickendorf and Gesundbrunnen that featured in the Koloniestraße incident. A second con-
centration was around the Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain, due east of the centre.
Friedrichshain was not a ‘frontier’ territory like the neighbourhoods to the north; here the
attraction was the availability of spaces that were well adapted to business, and especially
to the horse trade. Frankfurter Allee, a boulevard leading out of town, and adjacent streets
were also home to non-Romani horse dealers.

Figure 2. Romani Berlin 1905–1916 (detail) showing a section of Straube’s 1910 map
with details of the building pattern. (Map: Emily Smith; Straube Map Wikimedia commons).

Among the Romani residents of Friedrichshain was Wilhelm Steinbach, born in 1859
near Aachen and trading in horses in Berlin since 1905. When interviewed in April 1911,
he was renting premises in Frankfurter Allee that served both as a fixed place of business
and as a dwelling (one room with kitchen) for a monthly rent of 21 RM (about €130), on a
lease that still had six months to run; this was the fifth address he had had in the area. He
claimed to be in partnership with a Rixdorf horse dealer, and when his eligibility for a
licence was challenged, he pointed out that he had already had six licences and had no
criminal record. ‘[He] did not travel about the country’, he said, ‘but bought horses
only on the markets and sold them only here in Berlin and the region’. The four previous
licences on file are an index of the dimensions and solidity of his business; they author-
ized him to buy and sell horses using two two-horse wagons in return for the payment of
546 European History Quarterly 52(4)

substantial business taxes. Material from another file suggests that he was employing or
subcontracting to individual Romani horse buyers in other parts of the city, and reinforces
other evidence for business and mutual support networks that stretched across the city:
21-year-old Antonie Schopper, applying for a licence to trade in lace in her own right,
reported that she was living with horse dealer Hugo Franz, her ‘foster father’, and that
her own father dealt in horses on commission for Steinbach. In 1908 Muto Strauss
was paying 60 RM monthly for a dwelling and stall on a builder’s yard just off
Seestraße, from which he bought and sold horses using a single one-horse wagon. He
had paid both state and municipal income taxes in the previous year. His 19-year-old
son, the oldest of seven children, was registered as his assistant and stable boy and con-
tributed to the rent. Gustav Otto and Hermann Rose were both horse dealers living in
rented accommodation in Kösliner Straße (Wedding) in 1908; both their households
included assistants charged with displaying the horses, in addition to older or adult chil-
dren who helped in the trade. Otto was clearly a more ambitious businessman than Rose,
however: he reportedly bought horses in Russia and transported them by rail.

The Space of the Horse Market

The key space of operation of these and many other Berlin Sinti and Roma was the horse
market. In formal terms, this was a highly structured space, the procedures for its operation
dictated by regulations set by the municipal authorities (Marktordnung); the first record of
such regulations being issued for Weißensee dates from 1907, and these were updated after
the incorporation into Greater Berlin. Their principal focus was the control of movement into
and around the market space: entry only through three gates (one each for ‘luxury’ horses,
other horses and vehicles), with veterinary checks at the entrances; no entry without paying a
fee; specified areas for hitching horses, standing vehicles, displaying the horses for sale and
putting them through their paces; hours of opening (in 1907, 10 am to 2 pm in winter); pro-
hibitions on ambulatory selling within the market and on sales outside the gates of the
market on market days; penalties (exclusion, fines or imprisonment) for breaches of
order. The day-to-day operation of the market was managed by a lessee (Pächter), who
paid the municipality an annual amount. He was responsible for maintaining buildings
and equipment and for keeping order (with the support of the police), and was permitted
in turn to keep the entry fees and hitching fees and to operate the restaurant on the
grounds. The first Pächter was a ‘known and trusted restaurateur’. The control of the con-
ditions under which horses were displayed implied a concern for the control of information –
levelling the position of buyers and sellers – which was also present in the requirement that
every seller display his name and address on boards provided for the purpose, in legible
characters and not obscured by ‘blankets, harnesses or the like’.55
The concerns about order and transparency that these regulations reflect were embedded
in the lore of horse markets and horse trading, which had its own Berlin variant even before
Weißensee went into operation. Of Charlottenburg there was already a well-established

55
General-Anzeiger, 6 December 1907; Bericht über die Gemeinde-Verwaltung von Neu-Weißensee, 21–2. See
also the (largely unchanged) market regulations in Amtsblatt für den Landespolizeibezirk Berlin 1927, 150 and
1931, 91, respectively. From the 1920s at the latest the regulations were identical for Charlottenburg.
Rosenhaft 547

catchphrase: ‘Spandau wind, a kid from Berlin, a Charlottenburg horse, you couldn’t do
worse’.56 This signalled the fact that it was mainly work horses of relatively low quality
that were on offer there, as at Weißensee.57 But it also reflected the wariness of the
horse market itself as an institution, and the persistent risk of being swindled. And part
of the risk and promise of the fair was that the trade depended on interactions with alien
and exotic others. A report on the Charlottenburg horse market from 1872 focuses on
the merchandizing skills ‘of that oriental race, which have helped it to conquer the
world of commerce and made it the sovereign ruler of finance’.58 This is a reference to
the Jews who continued to play a significant role in the horse dealing business in Berlin
as elsewhere. A generation later it was the Sinti and Roma at the Charlottenburg market
that attracted journalistic comment and the attention of press photographers.
The formal regulations intimate the way in which the market scene was necessarily
characterized by a combination of the order necessary to do business and the disorderly
energies inherent in the management and display of horses. The result was that at every
moment all participants were engaged in one or another kind of theatre. Displaying the
animals in motion by putting them through their paces (Vorführung) was at the heart
of the market scene, a moment which epitomized the aesthetic and physical excitement
of dealing with horses and which was a favourite subject of visual artists and documen-
tarists.59 Recording in the 1950s his memories of Weißensee around 1930, Wolfdietrich
Schnurre (1928–1989) captures the contrast between the orderly lines of wagons at the
gate of the market and the drama of the Vorführung in a Romani figure:

At the end of the runway three horses were lined up, fiery steeds, prancing and each held tight on
a short rein. Then a man with a greasy jockey cap pushed to the back of his head gave a sign, and
the Gypsy who was holding the first horse ran forward with it. It was wonderful to see how the
two trotted over the sand which rose in clouds around them; the horse had yellow straw braided
into its mane and bright red boots on, and the Gypsy’s earrings kept flashing in the sun.60

The Vorführung deployed the arts of presentation at a distance; on the runway and in the
stall dealers practised ways of showing off a horse’s good points and disguising its weak-
nesses. The next stage in a sale was the close inspection of the horse by the buyer, examining
its teeth, feeling its legs, flanks and sides. At such close quarters cosmetic skills came into
play – combing, dressing and decorating the horse and also such practices as re-touching

56
See for example FLA, 5 October 1899: ‘Spandauer Wind, Berliner Kind, Charlottenburger Pferd, alles nichts
wert’.
57
Report of Royal Departmental Veterinarian Wolff, 7 April 1890, LABln, A Pr Br Rep 030–7168, 32.
58
‘Auf dem Charlottenburger Pferdemarkt’, Illustrierte Zeitung, 7 December 1872, 420–2.
59
For example, Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair of 1852–55: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/
search/435702.
60
Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Als Vaters Bart noch rot war (Frankfurt a.M. 1988), 135–6. For critical readings of
Schnurre’s Romani figures, see Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner; Wilhelm Solms, ‘Gut gemeint.
Dichtungen über die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Sinti und Roma’, in Christoph Suin de Boutemard,
ed., ‘Von Deutschen überhaupt’: Mentalitätswandel zwischen aufklärerischem Kosmopolitismus und
Nationalismus (St. Ingbert 2009), 189–203, esp. 190–2.
548 European History Quarterly 52(4)

the coat with shoe polish. When seller and buyer were face to face, however, the key decider
was the sales pitch. Schnurre gives an account of such a transaction on the Weißensee market
from the perspective of a child observer. The dealer, in this case Jewish, manages to unload
‘the ugliest horse I ever saw’ on a buyer, first by talking it up: ‘He didn’t just call it a splendid
horse, he transformed it into a splendid horse … I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t noticed
right from the start how beautiful, how powerful, how racy it was’. The buyer’s commitment
is finally won, however, by the dealer’s show of not wanting to part with the horse – another
piece of theatre that features in many reports of horse trading.61 The sale agreed, the dealer,
‘nodding as he counted the money, put it away in a big purse and, with a wink, stretched out
his hand to the red-faced man, who reached out and slapped it’.62 Known in English as the
‘chop’, the act of sealing the deal by clapping hands, the seller with his palm turned upwards,
was and remains nearly universal among horse dealers; it was often the last in a series of such
gestures, each accompanied by a proposed price.
In fact, the process by which a negotiation came to this conclusion was never a matter of a
one-sided pitch, and it was rarely only the seller who was performing. The transaction was
typically an extended dialogue in which each party used displays of expertise and indifference
to whet the appetite of the other, before they entered into a final negotiation over the price.
This was a theatre in which the actors met on equal terms, but it was in the nature of the trade
that those terms included shifting measures of trust and suspicion. The buyer had to rely on a
combination of his own expertise and trust in (or critical assessment of) the seller to reach the
point where he was ready to close a sale. Both of these came with experience of the market
and mutual familiarity. Grounds for mistrust were many, particularly when the seller was
from an outsider group. The popular stereotype of the ‘Gypsy’ horse dealer was that he
always dealt in sub-standard wares and succeeded in making sales only through double-talk
and cosmetic tricks. But any experienced buyer would be aware that positioning and handling
a horse so as to make it appear healthier, bigger, stronger, more lively than it really was, and
using every rhetorical trick to persuade a buyer that this was the horse he really wanted,
belonged to a repertoire that was fully accepted by ‘respectable’ horse dealers and even
recommended in the handbooks.63 The one account that we have of such a transaction
from the Romani perspective is that of Reinhard Florian, whose father dealt in horses in
East Prussia. Florian’s account focuses on the buyer, who he knows is putting on as much
of an act as the seller. The fine balance between familiarity and distance, self- and other-
awareness in these relationships is also apparent in Florian’s good-humoured contempt for
the (non-Romani) farmers – ‘idiots’ whose worn out horses his father was able to buy
cheap, re-condition and sell on for an honourable profit.64

61
For examples of this practice on the part of Romani dealers: Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 July 1908;
DT, 2 March 1910; Hannelore Patzelt-Hennig, ‘Die Zigeuner sind da…’, Das Ostpreußenblatt Series 2, 31 May
1975, 17.
62
Schnurre, Als Vaters Bart noch rot war, 136–8.
63
See e.g. Franz Bittner, Pferdehändler und ihre Geheimnisse (Neudamm 1926). For earlier periods: Barbara
Tichy, Pferdehandel und Roßtäuscherpraktiken im Spiegel tierheilkundlicher Literatur zwischen 1780 und 1850
(PhD Dissertation, Giessen, 1995).
64
Reinhard Florian, Ich wollte nach Hause, nach Ostpreussen! Das Überleben eines deutschen Sinto, Jana
Mechelhoff-Herezi and Uwe Neumärker, eds (Berlin 2012), 13.
Rosenhaft 549

Apart from Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s story, there are very few published accounts of what
actually went on at the Berlin horse markets. This is probably related to the fact that while
they retained a fascination for Berliners, they differed from the large annual horse fairs
held in the provinces (like the Wehlau fair attended by the Florians) in that they were not
associated with other kinds of entertainments like fun fairs and (as Baedekers of the period
show) were not advertised to tourists. Much of the evidence for life on the markets is accord-
ingly visual. A significant source of representations for the early twentieth century is the work
of press photographers. The Haeckel brothers, Otto and Georg, Conrad Hünich and Philipp
Kester gave particular attention to the horse markets, the Romani presence, and the combin-
ation of the two. The Haeckels’ agency was the source of the photograph of Petermann cited
above, one of a series taken in Charlottenburg and Weißensee. In Weißensee they photo-
graphed scenes of Romani life outside the market, including a 1910 wedding.65
There seems to have been a second wave of press interest in Berlin’s Sinti and Roma
and also in the horse markets around 1930, and the best visual documentation that has so
far come to light is Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1932 short film Grossstadt Zigeuner [sic]
(City Gypsies). Moholy-Nagy regarded his film as an aesthetic experiment and many
of the episodes he filmed at a Romani caravan site in (probably) Reinickendorf were
deliberately provoked or set up, but the scenes of the Romani families setting off for
the horse market and the goings-on in Weißensee that occupy most of the first third of
the film have an indisputably documentary character. They portray all the elements of
the market scene described above, from the Vorführung to the inspection of the horses
and the dramatic body language of the buyers and sellers – for the most part
non-Romani and Romani respectively – to the ‘chop’.66
The visual evidence is suggestive among other things about the gendered character of
market work. That Berlin’s markets really were places for business is suggested ex negativo
by the absence of reports of Romani women telling fortunes on the premises or at the margins
of the market. This was a characteristic feature of other, periodic markets and fairs attended by
Roma. At a fair like Wehlau, which could go on for several days, there was typically a par-
ticular space on the edge of the fairgrounds where visiting Romani families camped. While
the men and boys entered the market space to do business, the camp could be visited by fair-
goers interested in the spectacle of the exotic or in the frisson of having their fortunes told.67

65
The photographs referred to here and below can be seen on the websites of the Süddeutsche Zeitung
(Sammlung Scherl) (https://www.sz-photo.de) and Ullstein (https://www.ullsteinbild.de) photo archives. On
the respective photographers, see Philipp Kester Fotojournalist: New York-Berlin-München 1903–1935, Dirk
Halfbrodt and Ulrich Pohlmann, eds (Berlin 2003); Dirk Palm, ed., Alltag in Berlin. Fotos der Gebrüder
Haeckel 1900–1920 (Erfurt 2007). Press photography of this period does not feature in Frank Reuter’s study
Der Bann des Fremden. Die fotografische Konstruktion des ‘Zigeuners’ (Göttingen 2014).
66
The film can be viewed on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://collections.
ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000568. On the making of the film, see Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy.
Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA and London 1969), 78–82; Robin Curtis, ‘The Stranger in a City
Filled with Strangers: Moholy-Nagy’s “Urban Gypsies”’, Framework, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2003), 42–56. As
Reuter points out, it is significant that Moholy-Nagy’s contemporary August Sander also assigned Roma to
‘the city’ in his photographic series Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts: Der Bann des Fremden, 400.
67
See Tamara West, ‘Intersecting Lives: The Brough Hill Fair as Biography-in-Pieces’ and Eve Rosenhaft, ‘The
Florians, the Habedanks and the Horse Fair at Wehlau’, in Eve Rosenhaft and María Sierra, eds, European
Roma: Lives Beyond Stereotypes (Liverpool 2022), 107–25 and 149–66 respectively.
550 European History Quarterly 52(4)

In Berlin, there is plenty of evidence for the persistence of a gendered division of

labour in the Romani family economy in the wider city-space. Like Antonie Schopper,
women named the peddling of various items as their own trade while their male relatives
dealt in horses. The distinction in roles is signalled in the 1910 report of a Danish linguis-
tician who visited a group of horse dealer families recently settled in Müllerstraße after
years of itinerancy. He observed that while the men were dressed in the clothes typical
of German small businessmen, the women continued to wear more colourful,
Romani-style apparel – a badge of authenticity important to their public-facing work ped-
dling and fortune-telling.68 And it is confirmed by the continuing reports of women
selling ‘traditional’ goods and/or offering to read palms on the streets, a practice which
figures in Grossstadzigeuner, intercut with scenes of nattily dressed Romani men ped-
dling textiles.
But there is also evidence that women were an active if secondary presence in the city
horse markets, which took place more frequently and in a more compressed space than
the periodic fairs and had no tourist periphery. In their photographs of Romani subjects,
the Haeckels, Hünich and Kester gave particular attention to capturing picturesque indi-
viduals, many of them women. Significantly, many show Romani women among the
male dealers and visitors, at or near the centre of the action and in at least one case
showing off a horse, whip in hand. A notable exception to the predominance of exotic
costume and hairstyles in the photos is one that shows two young women dressed in
the height of urban fashion amid the horses and wagons. Moholy-Nagy, too, shows
horses being sold on the market from a family caravan in which a young woman is
seated. These images appear to confirm that to some degree at least the gendered division
of space and labour that historically characterized Romani family work on the market
scene was being eroded in the urban context. The arrest of Mother Petermann in the
Weißensee tavern also points to this, and there are further hints of a more active role
for women in the trade licence applications: Katharina Franz, wife of the horse dealer
Berthold Rosenbach, is described as his assistant (Begleiterin), her role being to accom-
pany him when he travelled to sales and to help out ‘in a small way’, holding the horses
and leading them out and back. Of Heinrich Arendt’s wife it was reported that she looked
after their six children, seeing to it that the three eldest attended school. When she did
leave the house it was to attend the Weißensee horse market, on those occasions
leaving an adopted daughter in charge of the children.69
The business of buying and selling remained the sphere of the men, however, and in
the course of his business the same Heinrich Arendt was the subject of a dispute that
offers some insight into the conditions of trade on Berlin horse markets. In July 1916
the police refused Arendt a licence, on the grounds that he was subject to a prosecution
for fraud – a charge which he denied. On Weißensee market, he had sold two horses to a
farmer from nearby Brandenburg for the sum of 3300 RM. They had not agreed a sched-
ule of payments, which in Arendt’s view, as communicated by his lawyer, meant that

68
Johan Miskow, ‘A Recent Settlement in Berlin’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, New Series 5 (1911–
1912), 14–37.
69
LABln, A Pr Br Rep 030 Nr. 2100, nos. 9 (Franz), 35 (Arendt).
Rosenhaft 551

‘obviously’ they would follow the practice ‘which has become absolutely standard in
wartime’ that full payment would be made on the spot (Zug um Zug). Arendt accordingly
refused to hand over the horses for a 1000-Mark down payment given by the buyer, and
as the dispute developed the buyer called for Arendt’s arrest. The two ended up in the
Weißensee police station, accompanied by another horse dealer, Gees, who had assisted
the transaction by writing out the formal guarantee on the horses. At the police station, an
officer grabbed the money from Arendt’s breast pocket and handed it to the buyer. The
buyer himself ‘still had enough of a sense of justice to give Arendt 10 Marks for the delay
to his business that had been incurred through his [the buyer’s] own fault’. In response to
Arendt’s protest that the officer was acting unlawfully in seizing the money, the police-
man responded that Arendt ‘was just a Gypsy, and with Gypsies they didn’t have to go
out of their way like that’. In the end the prosecution against Arendt was dropped.70
Heinrich Arendt’s story reveals little about the details of the transaction that preceded
the dispute. The inspection of the horses, the haggling and the ‘chop’ are taken as read.
What we do learn is that under normal circumstances the payment schedule would have
been part of the sale agreement, and that under the extraordinary conditions of wartime a
custom emerged that while unofficial was universally honoured – by locals at least. We
also see cooperation between Romani and non-Romani dealers; Gees was probably not
Romani, and very likely an employee of a well-established Wedding dealership.71 And
in sharp contrast to the programmatic hostility of the police which frames the narrative
as it coloured the everyday lives of Berlin Sinti and Roma, we see the buyer’s
acknowledgement of the inherent normality of the transaction and his own error.

Conclusion
Heinrich Arendt had a Jewish lawyer. He was not the only Romani businessman to call on
the help of Jewish attorneys, many of them known for their progressive politics and defence
of labour or anti-colonial activists.72 That connection indicates the existence of local net-
works operating within an emerging Romani community and crossing ethnic boundaries.
It signals among other things the growing visibility of Sinti and Roma as an urban minority
which could be the object of advocacy as well as exclusion within a shared civic space. This
article has argued that images of a substantially new Romani presence became part of the
way non-Romani Berliners pictured the growth of the new city around the turn of the
century, such that the real and imaginative borders between urban and rural, civil/ized
and uncivil/ized came to be represented by ‘Gypsies’ in urban, and especially suburban
space. They thus formed part of an increasingly racialized (though not formally segregated)

70
LABln, A Pr Br Rep 030 Nr. 2100, no. 35.
71
The address he gave was the home address of one of the directors of Schink & Müller, Brunnenstraße 138
(Berliner Adressbuch 1916).
72
Arendt’s lawyer was Oscar Schreier. In Berlin, Oskar Cohn and Theodor Liebknecht acted for Koloniestraße
defendants, Heinrich Radt, Hermann Freund and Alexander Löb for Romani clients denied licences to trade. The
Hamburg attorney Moses Levi, renowned for his defence of the Cameroonian Mpondo Akwa in 1905, was
known locally as ‘Gypsy Daddy’: Herbert Lindenberger, One Family’s Shoah: Victimization, Resistance,
Survival in Nazi Europe (New York 2013), 51.
552 European History Quarterly 52(4)

cityscape. This article has also attempted to complement this non-Romani perspective by
sketching the material dimensions of a shifting cityscape in terms of the lives lived in
‘Romani spaces’ within the city. Some of those spaces, the horse markets, were intrinsic
parts of Berlin’s economic life and sites of productive interaction between Romani and
non-Romani Berliners – and acknowledged as such. That is, the texture of Romani life
was changing as the city changed, and those changes were dialectically related, as Berlin
was developing as a self-consciously multi-ethnic city, like other twentieth-century metrop-
olises before the First World War and beyond. The account presented here remains a series
of sketches and hypotheses, and this reflects the state of the archival record in relation to the
lives of Romani Germans. It is a record that is not only systematically biased, but also
incomplete and fragmented. In this, it is a monument to the destruction of Berlin’s Sinti
and Roma by the Nazi regime. In pursuit of their own civic and urban imaginary, the
Nazis prosecuted to its logical conclusion the racist dream of clearing the cityscape of
‘Gypsies’. Those who were not interned in the Marzahn ‘Gypsy Camp’ in anticipation
of the 1936 Olympics were immobilized and forced into destitution; the last records we
have for the addresses of Sinti and Roma in Berlin before 1945 are those created when
they were deported to Auschwitz in 1943.73
That genocide, and the historical ruptures that followed, have notoriously left Berlin as
a space of fractured and layered remembering – the definitional ‘urban palimpsest’.74 At
the beginning of the twenty-first century the genocide is memorialized, but the Romani
presence is largely absent from narratives of the pre-war city. Memories of how the
horse market shaped Weißensee, and of how by virtue of its presence the district
became for a time a ‘Gypsy village’, are preserved by members of the Weißensee neigh-
bourhood association.75 They recognize in themselves the last generation of long-term
residents in a part of the former East Berlin which has itself nearly disappeared from
popular consciousness, except as lines on an old map and, with the emergence of post-
socialist ‘roots tourism’ since 1989, the site of two historic Jewish cemeteries.76

Acknowledgements
This article is framed within the HERA-funded BESTROM project (Beyond Stereotypes: Cultural
Exchanges and the Romani Contribution to European Public Spaces). I am grateful to my
BESTROM colleagues, and especially to Tamara West, as well as to the (anonymous) reviewer
for EHQ, for their comments and suggestions. During 2019–2020 my research and writing bene-
fited from the facilities and intellectual stimulation provided by a Visiting Professorship at the
Critical Global Studies Center, Sogang University, Seoul.

73
These are in the records of the Berlin Finance Office (Landesfinanzamt/Oberfinanzpräsidium Berlin), LABln,
A Rep. 092 Nr. 312.
74
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA 2003).
75
Website of the Weißenseer Heimatfreunde e.V. (http://www.berlin-weissensee.de/index.php/de/
heimatfreunde); conversation with Frau Sigrid Weise, Berlin, 20 January 2020.
76
On ‘roots tourism’ in this context, see Monika Reuthers, ‘Jewish Spaces and Gypsy Spaces in the Cultural
Topographies of a New Europe: Heritage Re-enactment as Political Folklore’, European Review of History:
Revue europeenne d’histoire, Vol. 20 (2013), 671–95.
Rosenhaft 553

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article: by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info), which is
co-funded by AoF, NCN, AHRC, AEI and the European Commission through Horizon 2020: by
a National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government
(NRF-2017S1A6A3A01079727).

Author Biography
Eve Rosenhaft is Professor Emerita of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool.
She grew up in New York City and studied in Canada and the UK. She has taught and published
widely on aspects of German social history since the eighteenth century. Recent books include
Black Germany (2013 – with Robbie Aitken), Slavery Hinterland (2016 – with Felix Brahm),
The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945 (2021 – with Celia Donert) and
European Roma: Lives beyond Stereotypes (2022 – with María Sierra).