This book shows that the most seemingly innocent stories are in fact tinderboxes. When I say tinderboxes, I mean real battlefields: places where historically decisive power relations have been settled, established, and represented. The literature studied in this book that readers now hold in their hands not only entertains and educates; children’s stories do many more things, things that those of us who, as scholars or as citizens, are interested in the genesis of our societies should be aware of. In this case, thanks to the research work of Jean Kommers, children’s stories about ‘Gypsies’ become a torch with which to illuminate the birth and consolidation of today’s European societies, uncovering their racist underpinnings within their cultural folds.

Armed with the tools of imagological studies and literary criticism, the author of this study has achieved a scientific feat which, however, is explained with the utmost modesty. Four national literary traditions are compared here to raise relevant questions about stereotypes whose cultural influence extends from the origins of modernity to the present day, questions about how they were constructed and how they work. The author draws on a very large body of sources in different languages to trace the presence of ‘Gypsies’ in narrative fiction addressed to successive generations of European children. During the 18th, the 19th and even the 20th centuries, a part of the pedagogy aimed at instilling the values of official culture and family discipline was exercised through stories in which disobedient or simply unfortunate children were stolen by bands of nomadic ‘Gypsies’ who, after making them disappear from the civilised world, abused and mistreated them. These captors, who are depicted as always living outside society, serve to represent all evils: thus, not only did the theft of children by ‘Gypsies’ become a recurrent topic in European children’s literature but, more generally, the way of life of these groups was depicted as being diametrically antithetical to that of national society.

This body of literature is inscribed in specific historical frameworks, which it also helped to shape. I am referring to the processes of state-building in the Western world, both in terms of the consolidation of the nation-state and its imperial projection; I am also referring to the construction of bourgeois society and the complex development of Liberal institutions such as elections and parliaments; I refer also to the slow but evident transformation of family and gender models, which, among many other things, implied a new concept of childhood and new visions of education (without which children’s literature would not have properly emerged); and I refer also to the birth of a new cultural market, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, which included such novelties as the emergence of publishing companies ready to conquer audiences, influence and profits. All these historical phenomena are related, and the production of children’s stories such as those studied in this book is at the heart of it all: these stories respond to the imperative need for a political pedagogy that supports new institutions and culturally homogenises the populations of the old kingdoms; these stories disseminate (and build) the gender and family models considered desirable, and thus feed the schools and libraries of increasingly literate societies; these stories are a business for savvy publishers and an occupation for not necessarily brilliant writers; these stories even serve traditional churches to adapt their discourses to a more effective indoctrination format in the face of advances in secularisation. The stories about ‘Gypsies’, which have been a notable part of modern children’s and young people’s literature since its birth as such, are also inscribed within this social architecture, helping to shape it as well. They are therefore fundamental to an understanding of European political, economic, and cultural history.

Jean Kommers gives them the attention they deserve. In addition to tracing the presence of fictional ‘Gypsies’ through countless children’s stories written (and translated) in various languages, he analyses these representations with critical exigency in terms of the multiple possible contextualisations (literary, cultural, and historical, in short). Knowing well his pioneering work from 1993, Kinderroof of zigeunerroof? Zigeuners in kinderboeken, I cannot say that I am surprised by the capacity for deep analysis of images with which he now observes German, French and English, as well as Dutch, tales.¹ In that study, which I encouraged him to revisit twenty years later, convinced of its heuristic power, the analysis of the myth of child stealing by ‘Gypsies’ helped him to identify a series of binary oppositions that recurred in the children’s stories and which have a strong symbolic meaning. The dichotomies light-dark, black-white, urban-rural, educated-uncultured, religious-pagan and other oppositions served within the communication framework of these stories to delimit the separate and incommunicable spaces of the mainstream society and the excluded Roma minority. This desirable and “logical” separation is disrupted precisely through the attack on society by the theft of a white child, and is definitively resolved when, to end the story, these children return to their world of origin, from which they should never have left. In a deep sense, the myth of child stealing plays an important role in the discourse on civilisation and barbarism so characteristic of modern culture, for it condenses into a macro-image the threat to physical and moral integrity that contact, however accidental, with barbarians would represent for the white man.

But for the author of this book it is not enough to point out the myth and assess its symbolic power; nor is it enough to relate these stereotypical representations to a long-standing xenophobic and racist - and classist - cultural matrix. What he has set out to do in extending the study to such a wide set of sources is to appreciate the evolution of stereotypes over time and space, and to uncover the changing intentions of the authors and publishers of these stories according to their specific historical contexts. He also wonders about the different readings that the public may have made of these representations, which are reductionist but not monolithic. This latter endeavour is particularly difficult, as he admits: to know how readers and listeners understood and interpreted these stories, how they served to shape their cultural references and mental frameworks; whether there was resistance or general obedience, and other issues related to the (changing) reception of the messages are often items on the part of the scholar’s agenda rather than interpretations supported by direct sources. However, anything is possible if the questions push the research forward.

An important support on this path is to be aware of the traps (rhetorical and logical) of the pedagogy that employs the ‘Gypsies’ as a literary device in children’s stories. As this book shows, the presence of ‘Gypsies’ is an effective and easy resource for storytellers of all kinds. From the moment that the social marginality and even the criminality inherent to this group is taken for granted – and coetaneous scientific, police and legal discourses insisted in these stereotypes –, their narrative existence serves to explain the rupture in the social order that activates the mechanism of a story, introduces the necessary tension for the action to continue, and helps to logically explain mysteries or disappearances. Fictional ‘Gypsies’ are used for all this, whether in leading roles or as a backdrop: they can be characters with “proper” names and traits, who are held responsible for the action that endangers the white children, or blurred groups that personify the threat to civilised society.

Kommers shows us how both formats of exploiting the figure of the “Gypsy” as a literary device are often developed in a pseudo-realistic style that is essential to sustain the author’s authority in the eyes of his/her readers. These stories usually distance themselves from other children’s sub-genres, such as fairy tales, and instead flaunt naturalism. The supposedly first-hand descriptions of life in gypsy camps, the detailed accounts of their customs and the occasional appeal to the writer’s own direct experience seek to assert objectivity in the name of expert knowledge, turning these tales into credible stories. However, these strategies frequently conceal an almost total lack of knowledge about the Roma and their ways of life.

The effect of this apparent realism adds to the other pedagogical qualities of children’s literature – repetition and simplifying reduction – to achieve a persuasive force that gets the reading public to naturalise the representations. Children reading these stories are not surprised that the ‘Gypsies’ are there to explain everything to do with the danger and social disorder that motivates the story, even if the arguments are logically flawed and some messages are even contradictory to each other. The attribution of a collective character to all ‘Gypsies’-Roma is hardly questionable from the reader’s point of view since the real-life referent of the fictional “Gypsy” has been rendered invisible by way of literary overexposure. For readers, the real Roma – with whom they would have little or no contact – should be like the fictional ‘Gypsies’, about whom they knew so much precisely because of the stories.

The author of this book wonders about the meanings and nuances of the diverse readings. Following in the wake of his work, a young researcher is recently studying, under my direction, children’s literature on ‘Gypsies’ in Spain, a country in which they have a special presence. Marta Egea-Bohorquez, in addition to collecting and analysing stories published in the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, has found documentation that will delight my friend Jean Kommers. This is a series of stories about ‘Gypsies’ written by child readers who, encouraged by certain children’s magazines and newspapers, became occasional authors in the 1920s.² This was a mechanism of collaboration between readers and publishers stimulated by the commercial developments of the cultural press in the early 20th century. It was also fostered by changes in the social conception of childhood, which was beginning to be recognised as having a certain autonomy and capabilities – always within the circle of appropriate family and school socialisation. In these clumsy efforts to become writers on the part of young readers, the ‘Gypsies’ serve to introduce the theme of the theft and mistreatment of children, as well as the social marginalisation of nomadic groups, with the aim of confronting these evils with the virtues of civilised society and, especially, of official religion.

Among these stories, we can highlight “Flory la gitana” (1926), written by an 11-year-old girl called Nélida Sardá, who we also know sent her story from Buenos Aires to the editorial office of the Spanish magazine Pinocho, fostered by the renowned Calleja publishing house. Nélida had read with profit the stories Kommers deals with in this book, which in their Spanish translations also circulated in Latin America, a large market which in turn generated its own literary traditions. Thanks to her application, the young Nélida composed a story in which an Irish girl, Flory, was stolen by ‘Gypsies’ and suffered a bad life, but finally regained her place in the civilised world (even marrying a lord) thanks to the rediscovery and practice of the true religion, the Catholic of course. Nélida’s story had logical inconsistencies, the result of the author’s writing lack of expertise; but the result was so convincing that she won the prize for the best short story awarded by the magazine.

Successive generations of Europeans – and Americans – were indoctrinated in obedience to family and national rules with stories such as those read by Nélida, which circulated between nations on both sides of the Atlantic: if Christoph von Schmid was widely read in his Spanish versions (the Cuentos del Canónigo Schmid were published repeatedly from 1864, based on a translation from French), Latin American authors, such as the Argentinian Berta Wernicke, incorporated the myth into their narratives (El niño robado, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1927). The images, bouncing off these walls of the Western publishing and cultural chessboard, robbed the real Roma of the possibility of being seen as anything other than child-stealing ‘Gypsies’ or criminals. As Kommers shows in this book, representations were neither stable nor could they have a single reading. Depending on the literary tradition, the depiction leaned more towards one stereotype or another. In general, representations evolved from a somewhat gentler Enlightenment-Romantic paradigm to a scientific-criminalist one in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when ‘Gypsies’ were portrayed as increasingly violent and unassimilable. Although in the 20th century some narrators occasionally participated in a humanist trend that would question the stigmatization of a whole group, their empathy insisted on exoticising the “other” rather than dismantling the process of stereotyping.

In the latter sense, being portrayed as a people of passionate, free, party-loving artists does not help much either as a calling card in historical moments when the rope of racial prejudice is stretched to breaking point. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz complex that included a special lager for Roma people, commented in his memoirs that the Romani prisoners were in some ways his favourites, because of the carefree joy with which they took their lot: “trusting as children”, they supposedly looked for the bright side of the situation, coped better than other prisoners with the harsh conditions of confinement, did not take work seriously and tried to have fun. That fiction can shape reality is particularly disturbing here when, at the beginning of his memoirs, Höss recalls his childhood and tells us that his parents would not let him leave the house because of the threat of the abducting ‘Gypsies’, who had once tried to steal him away.³

This extreme case shows that sublimation and stigmatisation can go hand in hand in complex stereotypes, which is particularly relevant in the case of the ‘Gypsies’ (think, for example, of the figure of Carmen, created by Mérimée, reused by Bizet and popularised by dozens of films from the very silent origins of cinema). Analysing how the various layers of a complex stereotype overlap and dissociate and are transformed is precisely one of the achievements of this research. This is a book that dissects the literary processes of the formation of images of ‘Gypsies’ in children’s stories in relation to their changing cultural and historical contexts. The author does not want to offer normative interpretations as an alternative pedagogy to the one he critically analyses here so carefully. It is not a question of blaming racism on all authors and all recipients of these stories, but of trying to explain how and why these racist images were consolidated and transferred, mutating historically. Thus, his warning that the dangers of othering persist, despite current changes in children’s literature, is as compelling as it is necessary in a world where stereotypes about ‘Gypsies’ are being applied in public discourses not only to their traditional bearers but also to immigrants and refugees of diverse backgrounds. Rather than a generic (and reassuring) accusation of racism levelled from the present at past social actors, knowing that stigmatising stereotypes are complex and shifting, as Kommers demonstrates in this book, will help us to critically review our own naturalised cultural conceptions and be aware of our prejudices.