Who actually speaks when we speak about the Roma? Who chooses the word, the moment it appears in the media, who decides whether a story is told or passed over in silence? That question is the starting point for thinking about the long history of Roma representation in Europe.
The Name as the First Battlefield
The word “Gypsy” (German Zigeuner, BCMS Ciganin, plural Cigani) did not arise from within; it was created and reinforced for centuries by the majority, while “Rom” comes from within the community itself, an act of taking the name back. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, in his study of how Europe invented the Gypsy, showed something that never stops unsettling me: the image we recognize today as “Gypsies” is not a description of reality, but a construction, assembled over centuries out of fear, exoticization, and the majority’s need to place its own projections somewhere. That construction has an archive, reaching back to Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia of 1550 and Dillmann’s Zigeuner-Buch of 1905, long read as sources of knowledge about a people, when in fact they were a mirror of the majority itself.
That archive can also be outright false and still keeps being passed down. An illustration linked to the so-called Sclavi Țigănești, still cited by Romani scholars, remains disputed: it is not certain that it is authentic in the form in which it circulates. Yet even if it is not what it claims to be, it still points to something historically confirmed: the slavery to which the Roma in Moldavia and Wallachia were once subjected. Invented and real stand side by side, and that closeness shows how hard it is to separate them in Roma history.
The World as Picture, the Press as Its Continuation
Heidegger argued that the essence of the modern age is not that one picture of the world replaced another, but that the world itself became a picture, something a subject frames and thereby conquers. Whoever pictures the world rules it. For the Roma, that formula has to be inverted: they become the picture, but never the one who pictures. Where the photograph stops, language takes over the relay; press micro-frames such as spatial precarity, crime, or victimhood do the same work, letting the reader possess the Roma as a known category without ever letting them set the terms under which they are seen.
David Mayall summed this up sharply: every image of the Gypsy is in one way real, since the Gypsy becomes whatever the writer imagines, and confirmation can always be found for whichever definition suits the purpose (Mayall, 2004). Long before him, Romanian-American writer Konrad Bercovici opened his book on the Roma with a confession that could stand for the whole European tradition: they have lived beside us for centuries, from Egypt to England, from Russia to America, and we still neither know nor understand them (Bercovici, 1930: 13). Written in 1930, it could have been written today.
Silence or the Chaos of Visibility in the Press
As early as 1983, Rüdiger Vossen included, in a volume on the Roma and Sinti between persecution and romanticization, a chapter by Michael Peters on the image of the Gypsy in the German press between 1981 and 1983, one of the earliest systematic readings of a pattern that repeats for decades: silence when there is no crisis, heightened visibility when a crisis breaks out. Silence was never neutral, it was a form of control, and the louder visibility that followed, in both the socialist and post-socialist press, rarely meant more accurate knowledge of the people it concerned.
