6 . Pond at the memorial monument on Sinti and Roma genocide , Berlin | Picture by Mike Peel . Wikimedia Commons
Zentralrat deutscher Sinti und Roma ( Central Council of German Sinti and Roma ) was established . During his visit to the newly established Council offices in Heidelberg , the then Chancellor of West Germany , Helmut Schmidt , officially recognised for the first time the existence of a genocide on racial grounds .
One of the Central Sinti Council ’ s most active battles from the late 1980s onwards was the fight for memory , demanding a rightful place in official Holocaust discourse and in the nation ’ s history . The project to build a memorial in Berlin as a site of remembrance and respect for the victims , an idea launched in 1988 , became an opportunity to push this campaign into the public eye . This opinion was already stirred by competing views on the Holocaust ’ s meaning for national identity , the extent of recognition due to different victim groups , and the impact of these debates following the unification of the two Germanys in 1991 . Indeed , the controversy over the memorial was long and was finally resolved by the German Parliament , which in 1999 agreed to build separate monuments for the various victim groups .
Some survivors became personally involved in the struggle to have their collective suffering
under Nazism incorporated into official narratives . A handful of storytellers recognised the need to bear witness to their experiences through autobiographical writing and memoirs , with the dual purpose of attempting to overcome their trauma and forcing their neighbours to look them in the eye . The effort to break the wall of silence was especially significant as younger generations were now able to distance themselves from Nazism without having yet been educated about the persecution of the Romani people . Philomena Franz , the first Sinti to publish her memoirs as a survivor , began writing after her son was insulted at school as a “ Zigeuner ”. Recognising in this insult the same kind of racial prejudice that had driven the wheel of Romani genocide under Nazism , she began speaking to teachers and students about what had happened to her people , following a need to testify . From there , she began writing , something that had not been possible before the cultural and political shift of the 1980s . Her memoirs , published in 1985 , paved the way for other survivors to follow ( Ceija Stojka , Lily van Angeren-Franz , Walter Winter , Ewald Hanstein , and others ).
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Observing Memories Issue 8