Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Politics Concerning the Roma during the Interwar Period: Therapeutic Punishment vs. Benevolent Paternalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The chapter explores how the concept of functional health and its reflection in the politics of diseases framed the surveillance of the Roma, which started as a systematic policy in the 1920s. This chapter discusses the specifics of the policy concerning the Roma in different parts of interwar Czechoslovakia – historical (Bohemia) and nonhistorical (Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia) – and then turns to the legal frames and theoretical arguments for tough surveillance introduced by interwar authorities within the combat against infectious diseases.
Keywords: campaigns against infectious diseases, internal colonialism, moral panics, the Roma
The Gypsy gangs in Bohemia: The invasion of infectious diseases
Established during the late imperial period, negative attitudes toward the Roma, viewing them as criminal and asocial, became caught up in the general fear of infectious diseases, especially in Bohemia, which experienced several pandemics of flu and other infectious diseases between 1919 and 1922. In the early 1920s, the Roma started to be seen as key carriers of the Spanish flu, the most dangerous pandemic at the time, as well as other infectious diseases such as smallpox, anthrax and typhus. Under the direct pressure of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Internal Affairs started a campaign aimed at “exterminating the Gypsy evil” by limiting freedom of movement for “Gypsy bands” and reinforcing their medical surveillance in Bohemia. The Ministry of Internal Affairs obliged local authorities, especially in the central region near Prague, to collect as much data as possible about the “Gypsy gangs.”
The discourse of functional health was applied comprehensively to constructing the “Gypsy issue.” As with other groups under the remit of Czechoslovak health policy, the Roma's state of health was monitored, albeit for quite a different aim: not to help them, but to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases. The general tone of the proposal was extremely hostile. “Vagrant gang” (kočující tlupa) remained the only concept to describe any Roma group: “Vagrant gangs are a permanent source of insecurity for the residential population because of the spread of infectious diseases, even though we do not need to speak about the other troubles created by them (theft, fraud, etc.) which are not directly under our responsibility to prevent.”
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- The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist CzechoslovakiaSegregating in the Name of the Nation, pp. 77 - 104Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019