Articles

Gypsy Roma Travellers History Month has provided the backdrop to many events around the capital and beyond this year, celebrating modern Gypsy life styles and reminding us of a sometimes heartbreaking past. The German Holocaust in Europe is one aspect of Gypsy history that is often overlooked. This exhibition is a timely reminder of the genocide that wiped out 500,000 Gypsies across Europe, through the stories of a community of everyday remarkable people.

Otto Pankok at work

Otto Pankok was a German artist at the top of his game in the 1920s.  A key member of the West German Impressionist Movement, his work was exhibited all over Germany and held in the collections of several institutions. In the 1930s he became interested in the Roma peoples of Europe while visiting Saintes Maries de la Mere in France and experiencing the gaiety of the annual Gypsy fair held there. Coming back to Germany he sought and found a community of German Gypsies (Sinti) living alongside Roma and local German people in a former French military zone in Dusseldorf. Renting a chicken shed as his studio, he lived and worked with the Sinti for the next four years, producing some seminal work and setting himself against the Nazi regime in a move that could have led to literal career suicide.

Fisili smoking  Otto Pankok. Fisili was called Mama Fisili in the Heinefeld settlement. She was believed to have fortune telling capabilities and predicted that something as worse than anyone could imagine would happen to the Sinti. She did so after an incident, when another Sinti lady, Ringela  had seen the "Mulo", which is a Sinti term for the "Death" as an appearance in 1933. Pankok believed that she predicted the Holocaust. Ringela was later killed in the Concentration Camp Ravensbrück.

The Stephen Lawrence gallery is an intimate space whose high ceiling which saves it from being claustrophobic. Plain white walls provide a stark backdrop to the bold dark lines of the simply framed woodcut portraits. Tall windows display the classical architecture and manicured lawns without which provide a neat contrast to the wild subjects of the artwork displayed within. Pancock’s woodcuts capture, in miniature and full length, flowing garments, wild hair and vivid facial expressions. His sculptures' proud bearing implies forthright movement; the diminutive subjects seem to advance to greet the visitor at the door. Elsewhere, photographs provide a poignant reminder that these are real individuals looking out across time.

Gaisa Barefoot  Otto Pankok

Many stories are unbearably if not unexpectedly sad. Most of the community did not make it to the end of the Second World War and died in camps as part of the Nazi “solution” to the Gypsy “problem”. There were a handful of exceptions, one of whom, a lady called Gaisa, was deported to Poland but managed to find her way back to the encampment in the unlooked for company of an SS soldier. A section of the exhibition shows some of the arresting woodcuts of her that Pankok made during their friendship. It also tells of the artist’s defenestration of her brutal SS traveling companion. The drop can’t have been too far as he still managed to crawl back into the barracks again within a day. For a man who boasted of using gypsies as target practice you have to conclude he got off lightly.

Romanus Kreutz, exhibition poster boy, as he is today

Moritz Pankok, the great nephew of Otto Pankok and curator of the exhibition, tells of other survivors notably that of Romanus Kreutz, whose swaggering profile graces the exhibition poster. Now rather older, he has been in touch and visited these works in the Documentation Centre of German Sinti and Roma in 2007. Other friends and relatives of the original Sinti community have also been in touch with Otto. For them the works provide a lasting testament to members of their families who would be otherwise lost as faceless victims.