Sinti Erotic

Ask a Sinti family in Cologne or Turin whether they are Roma and you will probably get a correction. The Sinti are a Romani people, sharing the Indo-Aryan roots that reach back to northwestern India, but they have been in German-speaking Europe since the early fifteenth century, long enough to become a distinct nation with its own dialect, its own reading of history and a firm sense of who belongs. Their heartland runs through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and northern Italy, with the closely related Manouches in France and Belgium. Their language, Sinte Romani, keeps the grammar and core vocabulary of Romani but carries centuries of German borrowing, enough that a Roma speaker from the Balkans would struggle to follow it. Most Sinti treat the language as family property. Community leaders have resisted having it written down, taught in schools or catalogued by outsiders, arguing that it is one of the few things the majority society never managed to take.

That guardedness has a history. Under the Nazis, Sinti were measured and registered by racial hygienists, then deported from early 1943 into the so-called Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was liquidated on the night of August 2, 1944. Most of the German and Austrian Sinti communities were destroyed. West Germany did not recognize the killings as a racially motivated genocide until 1982, after a hunger strike by survivors at the former Dachau camp two years earlier forced the question. The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma grew out of that fight. Religion is mostly Catholic, Protestant in the north, with a strong Pentecostal current since the postwar years, but the extended family, not the parish, is the working unit of Sinti life, and weddings, funerals and pilgrimages pull kin together across borders. Traditional trades were mobile: horse dealing, fairground work, instrument making, scrap, and above all music. Django Reinhardt, a Manouche, founded what is now called jazz manouche, and German Sinti guitarists such as Schnuckenack Reinhardt and Häns'che Weiss carried a swing tradition through the postwar decades. Less remembered is Johann "Rukeli" Trollmann, the Sinto who won the German light-heavyweight boxing title in 1933, was stripped of it within days, and was murdered in a concentration camp in 1944. Today nearly all Sinti live in houses or apartments, speak German, Italian or French in public, and pass unnoticed in the street, which is an outcome many of them have chosen.