Dr Andrej Studen, historian and scientific advisor at the Institute of Contemporary History, who has researched many marginalised groups and neglected historical issues in the past, has taken up perhaps the most forgotten, neglected and marginalised topic, the history of the Roma community.<\/p>\n
In European history, there is hardly a people who have been held in as much distrust and contempt as the Gypsies. Next to these unfortunates, we can only place the Jews, who are guilty of everything. Apart from the romantic clich\u00e9d images of the Gypsies, which did not correspond to reality at all and were created only by the dreams and longings of bourgeois society for a free and unbound life (e.g. in Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen), the Gypsies were dominated by negative ideas, stereotypes and social prejudices.<\/p>\n
Dictionaries, encyclopaedias and conversational lexicons published around the middle of the 19th century, for example, leave no doubt about this. Under the heading of gypsies, they refer to musical talents as well as to clerical scum, rogues, thieves and swindlers. And this mentality, as a ‘burden of the past’, has persisted stubbornly until today’s outbursts of anti-Gypsyism and the reinforcement of Romophobia, conflicts and confrontations, discrimination and stigmatisation on the basis of ethnicity. To this day, the sediments of the perception of the Roma way of life as unacceptable to society have remained, even though, in legal terms, the situation of the Roma has undoubtedly changed in recent decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
11 April, 2016, at 6 pm Romani kafenava, Maribor <\/p>\n