Romani Rose

Romani Rose

Romani Oskar Rose (born August 20, 1946 in Heidelberg , Germany ) is a German civil rights activist and has been chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma since 1982 .

family

Rose comes from a Sinti family. 13 members of the Rose family, including Romani Rose's grandparents, were murdered in concentration camps such as the so-called " Auschwitz Gypsy Camp " or the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Other relatives survived concentration camp imprisonment, forced labor , medical experiments in Natzweiler concentration camp or were able to save themselves by diving into "illegality".

His grandfather and father were traveling cinema operators. His father Oskar Rose and his uncle Vinzenz Rose survived the Porajmos . The two brothers campaigned for the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators as early as 1946; in December 1947, Robert Ritter was tracked down by a private detective in Frankfurt on their behalf. You initiated a criminal complaint against Ritter in 1948. Vinzenz Rose founded the Sinti / Roma civil rights movement in the early 1970s and set the first political accents.

Romani Rose worked as a businessman until 1982. He is married and has six children.

Civil rights work

Romani Rose campaigns for equal rights for the German national minority of the Sinti and Roma , for the protection of all Roma from racism and discrimination and for the clarification of the extent and the historical significance of the Porajmos, the genocide of the European Roma .

Since the 1970s, Rose devoted himself intensively to civil rights work for his minority. The starting point for him was the statement that antiziganism “did not disappear from people's minds at the end of the Second World War” and that “German politics had a very difficult time with its history”. Changing that meant having to “fight for awareness of the law” as a persecuted minority. Therefore, in 1980 a group of Sinti went on a hunger strike on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp memorial after the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior refused them access to the files of the " Landfahrerzentrale ", which was dissolved in 1970 . The hunger strike, in which Romani Rose took part as a speaker, became a globally recognized event, which was an important impetus for the commemoration of the National Socialist genocide, the protection of civil rights and the improvement of the social participation of the minority in Germany.

In 1979 Rose was elected chairman of the Association of German Sinti . Since February 1982 he has been chairman and managing director of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, which he co-founded and which is based in Heidelberg. The Central Council of Jews served as a model for the umbrella organization of today's 16 member associations (state associations and regional associations). Since then, the association has represented the interests of the national minority of the "Sinti and Roma" living in Germany at national and international level (the latter means "autochthonous" Eastern European Roma immigrants of the 19th century). In the meantime, he also campaigns for today's Eastern European Roma migrants, who have a committed advocate in Rose. In general, “the generic term is actually Roma, because the 10 to 12 million members of our minority [in Europe] call themselves Roma.” In 1991, Rose also took over the management of the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, supported by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma , a worldwide unique facility in Heidelberg .

The offensive civil rights work ensured that the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt received a delegation from the Central Council on March 17, 1982, including a rose, and recognized the Nazi crimes against the Sinti and Roma as genocide on "racial" grounds, which is significant under international law . This was confirmed once again by his successor in office, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl , in a Bundestag debate in November 1985. Federal President Roman Herzog supported the cause by declaring in 1997 that the genocide of the Sinti and Roma was based on the same racial madness and will to annihilate as the persecution of the Jews .

subjects

Romani Rose is working on the culture and social situation of the Central European Sinti, who later resided in the German Empire , as well as the former Eastern European Roma who migrated there in the 19th century, but have long been German as an integrated, settled Romance-speaking national minority through information campaigns and political initiatives to make known to the majority society and to enlighten them about the derogatory and romanticizing myths of the majority society. He played a major role in initiating and enforcing the erection of the memorial for the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism in Berlin , which was inaugurated in October 2012 in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel and Federal President Joachim Gauck . It is his merit to have brought racism and discrimination against members of the minority by authorities and politicians into public awareness after 1945. According to Rose, racism begins with the cliché of the “traveling people”.

His work topics also include the migration of Roma from the post-reunification states of Eastern Europe. For the minority today, there was “exclusion, a lack of prospects, racism”. Daily violence and inactive authorities force Roma to “live in complete anonymity”. Those who left their homeland would be “immediately pushed into the crime corner” in Germany under keywords such as “prostitution, begging and illegal work”. Biological-genetic explanations that have not disappeared are racist. In the 1970s, around one hundred thousand Yugoslav Roma came to West Germany as guest workers. "Their children are now German citizens, they have jobs that are completely integrated."

Fonts

• Sinti and Roma , publisher of the Society for Threatened Peoples , Göttingen 1980
• We want civil rights and not racism. Sinti and Roma in Germany for 600 years , ed. v. Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, Heidelberg 1985
• Civil rights for Sinti and Roma. The book on racism in Germany , Heidelberg 1987
• (together with Walter Weiss) Sinti and Roma in the “Third Reich”: the program of extermination through work. Ed. from the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, Göttingen, Lamuv, 1991 and 2nd A. 1995, ISBN 3-88977-248-X
• (Ed.) “We saw the smoke every day ...”: The National Socialist genocide of the Sinti and Roma. Heidelberg, Verlag Wunderhorn, 1999, ISBN 3-88423-142-1
• The national-socialist genocide of the Sinti and Roma [electronic resource] Heidelberg: Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, 2000
• The Catholic bishops and the deportation of the Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau [electronic resource] Heidelberg: Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, Heidelberg 2008

Romani Rose has written numerous articles, including contributions to publications by the OSCE and the UN Committee against Racism.

Honors

• In 2008 Romani Rose was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class.
• In 2012 he was awarded the Muhammad Nafi Tschelebi Prize .
• In 2014 Romani Rose was awarded the "Schleswig-Holstein Milestone" from the Association of German Sinti and Roma e. V. - Schleswig-Holstein State Association for its many years of commitment to the Sinti and Roma minority.
• In 2017 he was awarded the honorary award of the foundation "Munich Citizens' Prize for Democracy - Against Forgetting".
• In 2017 Romani Rose was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit.

Others

Since 2010, Rose, together with Maria Böhmer and Barbara John , has been the patron of Show Racism the Red Card Deutschland e. V.

literature

• Behar Heinemann: Romani Rose - a life for human rights. Foreword by Eckart Würzner, Lord Mayor of Heidelberg. Danube Books, Ulm 2017, approx. 250 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-946046-07-3 . Review.

Web links

Commons : Romani Rose  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Romani Rose in the catalog of the German National Library
• Romani Rose in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Page about Romani Rose at the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma
• Biography, 2006 (PDF; 15 kB) at Zentralrat.sintiundroma.de
• Courage, despite melancholy taz from October 23, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Zeit Online Calendar Sheet 2011 .
2. ↑ Rose's biography from 2006 on the Central Council's website ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 15 kB) accessed on January 13, 2012. 
3. ^ Romani Rose in the Munzinger Archive .
4. ^ Document reproduced in Anita Geigges / Bernhard W. Wette: Zigeuner heute. With a foreword by Eugen Kogon and greetings from Yul Brynner and others Bornheim-Merten, Lamuv 1979, p. 366.
5. ↑ Joachim S. Hohmann : Robert Ritter and the heirs of criminal biology: "Gypsy research" in National Socialism and in West Germany under the sign of racism. (Studies in tsiganology and folklore, vol. 4), Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M. 1991, p. 167.
6. ↑ See the biography on the homepage of the Heidelberg Documentation Center: [1] ; Romani Rose in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available). According to his own statements, he was a dealer in oriental carpets in the door-to-door business: Michail Krausnick: The gypsies are here. Roma and Sinti between Yesterday and Today 1981, p. 203.
7. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , "Antiziganism is socially acceptable". Conversation with Romani Rose, Chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, in: ders., Sinti and Roma: The undesirable minority, Berlin 2014, pp. 49–63, here: pp. 53f.
8. ↑ History of the Central Council, self-presentation ( memento of the original from June 6, 2013 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. , accessed on January 13, 2012, What was right then ... In: Die Zeit vom April 18, 1980, accessed on January 13, 2012. 
9. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, "Antiziganism is socially acceptable". Conversation with Romani Rose, Chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, in: ders., Sinti and Roma: The undesirable minority, Berlin 2014, pp. 49–63, here: p. 50.
10. ↑ ^{a b} Poverty immigration of Roma. Germany needs to exert a lot more pressure in: FAZ , February 24, 2013.
11. ↑ Patriarch and President receive the Peace Prize. Soester Anzeiger , accessed on May 24, 2012 . 
12. ↑ Schleswig-Holstein milestone. Retrieved November 14, 2014 . 
13. ↑ Munich Citizens' Prize. Retrieved May 23, 2017 . 
14. ↑ LifePR-Romani Rose takes over the patronage of "Show Racism the Red Card-Germany" .
15. ↑ Rüdiger Rossig: Biography of Romani Rose. The first demo in history. In: Taz-online, July 25, 2017.