Melanie Spitta

Melanie Spitta , née Keck (* 1946 in Hasselt , Belgium ; † August 28, 2005 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German filmmaker and civil rights activist from the Sinti minority .

Life

In 1938 Spittas fled to Belgium as a " gypsy " persecuted Sinti family, where she was born in 1946 as the youngest child. Her siblings had died in Auschwitz. From 1949, she grew up with the surviving relatives in Düren (Rhineland). Her mother, a former inmate of the Auschwitz , Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps , died early of tuberculosis , possibly as a result of medical experiments by Josef Mengele . Melanie Spitta suffered from lung disease as a child and had a lifelong health problem.

In the 1980s she worked as a film writer with the director Katrin Seybold on documentaries about the situation of the Sinti in Germany, as a civil rights activist she fought for equality for women among the Sinti and in society as a whole and worked incessantly as a consultant and publicist. Until she, Katrin Seybold, Siegmund Wolf and contemporary witnesses of the Nazi persecution set out to sift through the archives in the Federal Archives as part of the documentary films, there was no published photo of the perpetrators from the staff of the Racial Hygiene Research Center except for a photo by Eva Justin .

She was married to Arnold Spitta and has a daughter, Carmen. Arnold Spitta is the author of Paul Zech in exile in South America 1933–1946 (1978) and has a. a. on the persecution of the Sinti and Roma under National Socialism.

In 1999 Melanie Spitta in Lübeck received the Otto Pankok Prize from the donor Günter Grass . She was “honored because she counteracts the lack of memory”, it said in the laudatory speech. Dieter Schenk dedicated his book on the historical roots of the BKA to her “looking back on a twenty-year friendship”. She is buried in Düren .

reception

In 2015, the feminist group Inirromnja developed the performative reading with film contributions in memory of Melanie Spitta. I am resolutely against paternalism .

Works (in selection)

Films (with Katrin Seybold):

Don't scold us gypsies (43 min, 1980)
We are Sinti children and not gypsies (21 min, 1981)
It went day and night, dear child: Gypsies (Sinti) in Auschwitz (75 min, 1982)
The wrong word: reparations to gypsies (Sinti) in Germany? (ZDF, 83 min, 1987) director: Katrin Seybold, screenplay: Melanie Spitta, actors: Thomas Münz; Melanie Spitta
Meleza and Gallier (feature film, screenplay, unpublished)

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Dieter Schenk: The brown roots of the BKA, Frankfurt 2001.
↑ "I decidedly against paternalism" - a performative reading with film contributions in memory of the filmmaker Melanie Spitta, reading by IniRromnja about Melanie Spitta at the Academy of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, 2015, in: Vimeo-Kanal Romnja Power, upload from December 2015

personal data
SURNAME	Spitta, Melanie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Keck, Melanie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German filmmaker and Sinti civil rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH	1946
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hasselt , Belgium
DATE OF DEATH	August 28, 2005
Place of death	Frankfurt am Main

[1] Dieter Schenk: The brown roots of the BKA, Frankfurt 2001.

[2] "I decidedly against paternalism" - a performative reading with film contributions in memory of the filmmaker Melanie Spitta, reading by IniRromnja about Melanie Spitta at the Academy of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, 2015, in: Vimeo-Kanal Romnja Power, upload from December 2015