Media and Minorities

Stereotypes, Sound Bites, and Campaign Strategies  161
Stereotypes
Many of these reports renewed stereotypical ideas about Roma that drew on
traditional views of “Gypsies.” From the 19th century onward, novels, poems,
operettas, folk songs, hit pop songs, and movies presented the so-called “Gypsy
life” as the antithesis to civilization. Depending on how the creators of such
representations regarded civilization — whether as a project of the Enlightenment
and a manifestation of progress or a threat to human freedom — the
“Gypsies” they portrayed were either of a primitive culture or noble savages
who, free from the constraints of bourgeois life, happily roamed the land to
the sounds of beautiful music.5
Variants of these ideas can be found in many of the press reports from
2013/14. One example is the headline “With the Influx of Roma, Worlds Collide”
in the 25 February 2013 issue of Die Welt.6 The article underneath, which
addresses the conflicts between the residents of Duisburg- Rheinhausen and
Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants, presents the Roma as a people with
fundamentally different attitudes and values than the citizens of a modern
state. In the article, the neighbors of an apartment building inhabited primarily
by Roma report on the “abysmal conditions on the other side of the
street: loud music, shouting, and barbecue parties until late at night, garbage
thrown from windows, human excrement on the premises, no manners,
no decency.”
A traditional aspect of both the romantic and the derogatory ideas about
“Gypsies” is the clichéd belief that as a group they are hostile to vocational
training and regular work and would rather make a living from begging,
theft, scams, and the fraudulent collection of welfare benefits. To the editors
of Die Welt, it was apparently so obvious that crime was a Roma characteristic
that in February 2013 they used an image of four colorfully dressed women
in headscarves and long skirts to illustrate an article about German deportation
policy toward criminal immigrants — an article that never even mentioned
Roma.7 Under the headline “Friedrich to Deport Criminal Eastern
5 On the various stereotypes about Roma in the contemporary media, see, most recently,
Markus End,
medialer Kommunikation (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher
Sinti und Roma, 2014).
6 Kristian Frigelj, “Mit Zuzug der Roma prallen Welten aufeinander,” Die Welt, 25 February
2013, www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article113882481/Mit-Zuzug-der-Roma-prallen-
Welten-aufeinander.html.
7 “Friedrich will kriminelle Osteuropäer abschieben,” Die Welt, 23 February 2013, www.
welt.de/politik/deutschland/article113850055/Friedrich-will-kriminelle-Osteuropaeerabschieben.html.
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