Until recently very little was known about the Yenish people who have lived in Switzerland for over 300 years. As a result of media revelations in the early 1970s which exposed a brutal, state-run assimilation programme directed against the Yenish for over half a century, Swiss society was confronted with one of the darkest chapters of its recent history. Since then the Yenish writer Mariella Mehr has ensured that the plight of this minority ethnic group does not vanish from Swiss public consciousness. Along with other Yenish voices, Mehr's texts have enabled the silenced Yenish people to participate in the public discourse on their own history, which until recently has been written exclusively by non- Yenish bureaucrats, many of whom were actively involved in various coercive assimilation programmes directed against the Yenish. Her texts explore the experience of oppression, focusing on the individual consequences for the victim of the state-endorsed settlement programmes. Mehr's literary oeuvre is concerned with finding suitable discursive forms that express these hitherto unarticulated experiences of oppression. The act of writing for Mehr is consequently an act of resistance, challenging the linguistic structures of the dominant discourse, structures that are analogous to those responsible for perpetrating, justifying and subsequently concealing this oppression.

Before elaborating on the specifically subversive potential of Mehr's writings, I want to give a brief summary of the state-run settlement programmes directed against the Yenish by the Swiss authorities. These programmes were carried out with the approval and financial assistance of Swiss federal, cantonal and community organizations from the early nineteenth century until they were officially ended in 1973. During the 1920s these programmes were informed by the race and eugenics theories that enjoyed popular support in many quarters during the early decades of the twentieth century. As members of a group officially categorized as ‘racially degenerate’, the Yenish were systematically abused as wards of the Swiss authorities in prisons, reform institutions, orphanages, foster homes and psychiatric clinics and prisons. These assimilation projects included ‘curative’ medical treatments for their ‘genetic deformity’, such as frequent EST, insulin therapy and compulsory sterilization. One of these assimilation programmes involved the removal of Yenish children from their biological families and their forcible assimilation into a Swiss-gadjo culture, the ultimate aim of which was the gradual erasure of the nomadic Yenish culture in Switzerland.