Reinhold Lagrene

Reinhold Lagrene (died November 28, 2016 ) was a German Sinto and an expert on the Romanes of the Sinti (also referred to as Sintitikes by linguists ) and especially on the narrative culture of his minority. He lived in Mannheim .

Life

Reinhold Lagrene has been active in the Sinti civil rights movement since the 1970s. Since the founding of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in 1982, he was a board member there. At the beginning of the 1990s he was involved in setting up the Documentation and Culture Center of German Sinti and Roma and was also elected to the board. In 2001, after working for a long time in the state associations of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate of the Association of German Sinti and Roma, he took over the management of the education department in the documentation center.

Also because a large part of his family fell victim to the Porajmos during National Socialism , he became involved as a second generation victim in the civil rights movement against antigypsy attitudes, attitudes and actions. In writings, conferences, readings and other public events, he conveyed the culture of the Sinti to the majority population as well as an awareness of the importance of the language within the minority itself. His work focused on the preservation of the minority language and the equality of the minority in education. He was particularly interested in the collection of fairy tales or other narrative forms of the Sinti. Together with his wife Ilona, ​​who also belongs to the second generation of survivors and has been involved in the civil rights movement for a long time, he also recorded eyewitness surveys of Sinti who had survived the Nazi persecution. They conducted the interviews partly in Romani, partly in German. As early as the 1970s, they worked on coming to terms with their history under National Socialism and tried to overcome the widespread speechlessness of the victims from the ranks of the Sinti.

Together with the musician Romeo Franz he developed the project "Parmissi" - stories and songs of the Sinti and Roma . Parmissi and Paramisi are the most formalized, authoritative forms of prose in the narrative culture and partly in folk literature of the Roma. Ideally, they also contain standard formulations, for example at the beginning, and the requirement to be presented correctly and with a beautiful choice of words.

Lagrene played a major role in ensuring that parts of the Sinti storytelling culture were written down. He considered it possible that the oral tradition alone "in the long term" would no longer be sufficiently sustainable. He felt the need "to write down everything I still remember and to put it on paper." This need was rooted in his own uncertainty as to whether his generation and that of his children would, despite general developments, have the strength to "convincingly pass on what defines our culture to the next generation".

Fonts (selection)

• Oral storytelling as folk culture - reflections from the inside. In: Wilhelm Solms , Daniel Strauss (ed.): "Gypsy pictures" in German-language literature. Heidelberg 1995, pp. 103–110.- From this: The story of Chinto Mari. abstract
• Collaboration with: State Center for Political Education Baden-Württemberg (Ed.), Between Romanticization and Racism. Sinti and Roma 600 years in Germany . Stuttgart 1998
• With Daniel Strauss, Ilona Lagrene: ... got away. Reports and testimonies from Sinti who survived Nazi persecution. Berlin, Vienna 2000
• The German Romanes. History of a non-codified language , in: Christel Stolz (Ed.): In addition to German. The autochthonous minority and regional languages ​​of Germany. Bochum 2009, pp. 87-102
• On the situation of Romanes, in: With the regional and minority languages ​​on the way to Europe , Bremen 2011 online
• Balance of Identity , in: Oliver von Mengersen (Ed.): Sinti and Roma. A German minority between discrimination and emancipation (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education , vol. 1.573), Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-8389-0573-0 , pp. 245-259
• Djiparmissa. Classical poems in Romanes. Translated and edited by Reinhold Lagrene, Heidelberg 2018

Media reports

• Alexander Albrecht: She has been fighting against prejudice for 40 years. Ilona Lagrene, who comes from Heidelberg, is committed to ensuring that the Sinti and Roma no longer hide who they are. in: Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung of November 7, 2013
• Sarah Levy (text) and Felix Schmitt (photos): House visits to Sinti families. With calluses on the soul. They speak Palatine, Hessian, Bavarian or Romanes. The Lagrene family has lived in Germany for centuries. It's not that easy. in: taz of October 26, 2013

Individual evidence

1. ↑ With the cornea on the soul, in: taz, October 26, 2013, see: [1] .
2. ↑ Oliver von Mengersen (ed.), Sinti und Roma. A German minority between discrimination and emancipation (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education), Bonn and Munich 2015, p. 274; Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma: [2] ; Minority Secretariat of the four autochthonous (regionally ancestral) national minorities and ethnic groups in Germany: [3] .
3. ↑ see e.g. B. "Conference Nebendeutsch. The autochthonous minority and regional languages ​​of Germany", University of Bremen, 2007: [4] ; Participants of the federal / state working group “Integration through Education” on June 19, 2012 Information about Germany's progress in implementing its national strategies or political measures for the integration of Roma ( memento of the original from July 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info : The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Conference "Borderline Experiences. Roma Literatures in Romania", University of Regensburg, 2010: [5] ; Conference of the Ackermann congregation, 2013: [6] ; Hugo Höllenreiner . The testimony of a surviving Sinto and his perspectives for our culture of remembrance, University of Koblenz-Landau, 2014: [7] . 
4. ↑ "It always has to do with discrimination", in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 7, 2003, see: [8] .
5. ↑ Oliver von Mengersen (ed.), Sinti und Roma. A German minority between discrimination and emancipation (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education), Bonn and Munich 2015, p. 274.
6. ↑ See event "Narrative traditions and fairy tales of the Sinti and Roma", Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, 2005, Marburg, see: [9] .
7. ↑ "Parmissi" - Stories. Storytelling café of the Sinti and Roma (2011).
8. ↑ Keyword Paramisi on rombase.uni-graz.at .
9. ↑ Reinhold Lagrene: Oral storytelling as folk culture - considerations from the inside. In: Wilhelm Solms / Daniel Strauss (ed.): Gypsy images in German-language literature. Heidelberg 1995, p. 96ff., Cited from [10] .