The representation of so-called ‘Gypsies’ (the term used to refer to Roma, the German Sinti and different travelling groups) in modern European literatures and cultures reads as a somewhat monolithic story: even more than in the case of other ‘minority’ groups, a hegemonic discourse seems to persist almost unchallenged by alternative voices or historical changes throughout the centuries. The exclusion of Roma and Sinti from the dominant culture's institutions of education has prevented the emergence of an extensive body of self-representations, and the enormous quantity of ‘Gypsy’ texts by non-‘Gypsy’ authors attests not least to the degree to which racial stereotypes are unaffected by differences in genre, political stance or historical change. This does not mean that the representation of ‘Gypsies’ is ahistorical: in the decades before and after 1800, the dominant early modern approach to ‘Gypsies’ – based on the ascription of social deviance – was replaced by an anthropological dispositif (Foucault), i.e. a set of discourses, policies and institutions gathered around the idea of ethnic and, eventually, racial identity. This modern perception, however, was informed by traditional anti-‘Gypsy’ discourse: the putative ‘anti-social’ vagabonds turned into a ‘nomad race unfit for civilization’. It was in this guise that the imaginary figure of the ‘Gypsy’ was handed down through the twentieth century. In Germany, the racist concept of the ‘uncivilized’, ‘anti-social’ nomadic people (on which Nazi ideology drew) resurfaced in the antiforeigner campaigns of the 1990s focused on the icon of the Gypsy as the quintessential stranger.

Even contemporary literature that attempts to treat the history of persecution and genocide critically seems to be overpowered by the force of this hegemonic discourse: thus, in her book Der weibliche Name des Widerstands: Sieben Berichte (Woman's Face of Resistance: Seven Reports) (1980), Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer treats ‘the Gypsy woman’ differently from all other (individualized) protagonists, having the narrator reflect on her inability to get over her own prejudice and her stereotypical view of ‘the Gypsy woman’. Struggling with the ‘given’ traits of the represented ‘Gypsy’, these texts show the force of the dominant anthropological discourse which constructs ‘the Gypsy’ as an eternal other to civilization and modernity.