This past weekend the class spend time together working in collaborative pairs to help each other practice writing and in doing so also help one another work out some of the continuing challenges and ideas surrounding our projects. Below were just some of the nearly two pages worth of writing that I with the aid of my fellow colleges was able to think of and hopefully address in the future with more research.
When looking at a mass historical period such as the First World War in relation to a specific people and how they are treated one may have issue getting lost in the historiography of the time period. This is one of the challenges I believe I will be facing when approaching this project as one of the main points of this project will be to try and connect the history which I will be researching to the transnational movement of the Gypsies of Europe specifically in France, Italy, Germany and Poland. These countries will be focused on mainly because they are the countries where the largest population of the Romani were and still are found outside of Romania and that also see the most mistreatment from the local people of that country. But this all leads to my main argument centers around the idea that the treatment of these people before the war is what places them at the margins of the society and this is what leads them to be seen as less than human by the Nazi regime which leads to the Gypsies being placement in concentration camps. And this arguement is my fear as it is so complex and focuses so highly on the movement which leads to the mistreatment of these people before and during the war that I am fearful I will get lost in the history of the movement and treatment rather than connecting these things across time, space, and boarders to make an argument about these people’s history in relation to transnational history.
This all leads to my next obstacle which is trying to link these different countries together by way of the mistreatment of these people. When facing this dilemma my thought is to approach it by stating first and foremost that these people were not confined to one or another country and in fact often many of them moved from two to even three countries through a few years. The next way in which they I will try and approach this is by comparing the treatment of these people both before, during and especially after the war which despite the Romani being in vastly different countries often is very similar as can be seen in film, photography, literature and art. This leads to the obstacle of comparing the treatment of the Jewish people to that of the Romani as unlike the Jews after the war ended the Gypsies treatment did not really improve. The obstacle with this is to not try and compare to much but also to little with the Jews as the paper could be weighed down in such a complex argument but rather to use the comparison as a way in which to highlight the case of the Romani people.
All of this ultimately brings me to the obstacles I will be facing with sources. The good thing to note about sources is how many are available not just with historical articles but also in many different media, photography, film, literature but also across different areas of study such as sociology, anthropology, and even archeology and many of these are not just secondary sources but primary sources as well. However a good majority of these sources are not in English or french the two main languages which I speak. The most obvious obstacle is many of the primary sources for the Romani people is in their language or dialogue, if they’re thoughts are even written down as much of their cultural history is oral.
These are the main obstacles which I believe I will be facing as I continue to research and begin to compile that research into a possible paper.