Germany likes to present itself as the ‘world champion of remembrance’, as a place where historical violence is dealt with in full and its victims are remembered. Yet white German society swept the genocide of Sinti and Roma during the National Socialist era under the carpet after the end of the Second World War. Worse still, the structural discrimination did not stop after 1945. Sinti and Roma communities responded to this second persecution with various strategies of resistance. For decades, the memory of the deported and murdered Sinti and Roma was kept alive almost exclusively by the survivors, and is now mostly kept alive by their descendants.

At Empowerment and Resistance, Hamze Bytyçi, chairman of RomaTrial and artistic director of the international Roma film festival Ake Dikhea?, Kelly Laubinger, managing director of the Sinti Union Schleswig-Holstein, and Isidora Randjelović, social pedagogue and co-initiator of the feminist Rom*nja archive RomaniPhen, talk about these different strategies with Max Czollek and Ibou Diop and recall stories and events that are still barely known to wider society today. Their focus lies on the connection between resistance and a new urgency to act, which is realized by Sinti and Roma in response to constant rejection, criminalization, and stigmatization they encounter in Germany. Bytyçi, Laubinger, and Randjelović chronicle a history of violence and of self-empowerment that extends to the present day.

Podcast to the event: Who does Germany belong to? Episode 4, Audio in the HKW Mediathek