Abstract
Abstract German self-design as a nation frequently draws on Gypsies as liminal figures. They are the subject of a number of paradoxical representations: as ancestral founders, as omniscient observers, and as the absolute “other” of the German nation. The essay explores representations of Gypsies in criminology, anthropology and ethnography as well as in literary texts of the 18th and 19th centuries (Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Erich Biester, Richard Liebich, Friedrich Ave-Lallemant, and Wilhelm Raabe) and focuses on the reflections contained within them on the ethnic and sociographic cohesion of German society. The contradiction between the appreciation in texts of “imagined Gypsies” and the radical exclusion of persons considered as “real Gypsies” can be viewed as inherent to the paradox of the German nation’s self-design.
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