Introduction by Caroline Froh

In November 1998, Mariella Mehr received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel. She opened her acceptance speech by quoting from her personal file at Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse (“Charity for Children of the Country Road”), the social programme that raised her:

“Before you stands an ‘unstable, ungrounded, impulsive psychopath with neurotic tendencies and a strong need for external validation, something clearly evidenced by her desire to become a writer. In light of her heredity – the subject belongs to the fourth generation of a degenerate vagrant family – a permanent commitment to a psychiatric clinic cannot be ruled out.”

The programme, which was established to address the problem of “vagrancy”, ran from 1926 to 1973. It was administered by Pro Juventute, a charitable foundation funded by the Swiss state, whose agents targeted the travelling people, namely the Yenish and Sinti, with the goal of turning them into settled and “productive” members of society. Vagrancy, so went the rational, was a genetic trait that led to moral depravity, diminished intellectual function and psychopathic tendencies, among other issues.

Hilfswerk workers removed children from their homes – often changing their names so that their families could not locate them – and placed them up for adoption, or into orphanages and psychiatric institutions. Abuse was rife, and children were subjected to forms of mental and genetic experimentation that the Third Reich’s eugenicists would take inspiration from.

Born in 1947 to a Yenish mother, Mehr belonged to the second of three generations of her family to pass through the programme. At 17 she experienced a political awakening, when the authorities placed her in the Hindelbank women’s prison in order to prevent her marrying the father of her child. She was declared an unfit mother, and her newborn son was taken away. Upon her release, she devoted herself to researching – and writing about – her people’s buried history.

As a journalist, Mehr advocated on behalf of the Yenish, as well as other social outsiders. She reported from inside prisons and institutions; wrote about striking workers and refugees; and campaigned for women’s suffrage (only attained in Switzerland in 1971). “You see, I’m not cut out for tame writing,” she declares in her essay “On the Myth of Switzerland as an Island”. “I am one of them. I have always regarded Switzerland from below.”

This perspective remained the lifegiving pulse of her work, even as she turned to other forms – poetry, novels, short fiction and essays, which won great acclaim in the German-speaking world. (The Swiss Schiller Foundation Prize was among her many awards.) Yet she remains largely unknown outside Switzerland – Nightmare of the Embryos: Selected Short Writings, just released by New Directions, marks her first book-length translation into English. The neglect might have something to do with her style, which can be disorienting, destabilizing, and at times violent. Averse to hierarchies, she exploded grammatical structures and frequently upended logic with images that better convey the force and texture of her spiraling thoughts. Her phrasing can be obscure, though never less than powerful.

As bank schemes involving financed Nazi escape routes still make headlines in Switzerland, and hostility towards women and outsiders is finding renewed legitimacy across the continent, readers will find a fresh urgency both in Mehr’s words and her insistence on circling back, and back, and back again, through history – until finally, we listen.

On the Myth of Switzerland as an Island

When I think of Switzerland, the first thing I see is a mountain village, high up on a gentle slope. The villagers work their fields. Cows stand healthy in their stalls, pigs root around in the mud, a rooster crows atop every dung heap. In the foothills sits a castle. Its inhabitants, who seem friendly enough, are notable for their pluck and anarchic spirit. Their ancestors were robber barons whose large estates were cultivated by a handful of the poorer villagers. You’d never catch sight of them in either of the village churches – they prayed in their own private chapel, though presumably to the same God as their servants.

There was also a Gypsy clan in the village, which had settled there generations earlier. They were no different from anyone else, aside from the fact that their men disappeared for a few months each spring to purchase young horses that they’d later sell at the Thusner Market. Horse handling was seen as an honourable vocation; there were horses on every farm.

When times were hard, some better-off villagers would hire Gypsy men as day labourers, and Gypsy women would work as maids, or go door-to-door with their children, selling cloth and thread and other notions. Sometimes the community would contribute a sack of potatoes or a bushel of apples. But in a good year, when the men sold off all the horses, it wasn’t uncommon for them to invite everyone for a celebration. The farmers would join in and dance to the Gypsies’ music. Witch hunts, and the associated murder of Gypsy mothers and children, were over and forgotten.¹

That all changed with the arrival of the Spanish Flu and the crisis that followed the First World War. Someone had to be held accountable – for the neglected fields and empty municipal coffers, for the murmured prayers that went unanswered in churches and farmers’ bedrooms. Someone had to be found culpable for the deaths of so many wives and children. And there was one man, one of my mountain kind, who’d brought a black-haired Gypsy from the lowlands up to the village – a woman who loved to laugh and sing, who swayed her hips as she danced, even when her clan was up to their neck in water.

Wherever there is guilt, there is usually also someone ready to scrub it away. In this case it was Pro Juventute, endowed with the blessings of the municipalities, the cantons, and the Swiss Confederation; not to mention the many white-coats who had for some time been contemplating the inferiority of crooked noses and the lustful swaying of Gypsy women’s hips – a shame that isn’t Switzerland’s alone to bear. So it was off with the crooked noses and swaying hips, out with the inferior wombs, and away with the stuff that makes a man – the institutions required a different kind of virility. A man had to slave away until his walk was as crooked as the nose that betrayed his inferiority. When the birth of a Gypsy bastard was reported, the charity took possession of him until, transformed into a zombie, he could be put to work on any simple task.

You see, I’m not cut out for tame writing. I am one of them. I have always regarded Switzerland from below. I’ve spent my adult life grappling with the racial hygienists and other people-flayers, until I came to understand that Switzerland is not an island, not at all. Its shapely nose has always been able to sniff out and destroy whatever needed destroying. It has always pursued wealth and power, while maintaining its moral uprightness. To talk about Switzerland as an island, whether it’s intended as praise or accusation, is a euphemism of the worst sort. As I write this today, I am thinking of the unspeakable discussions surrounding the Holocaust, and the legions of those who would whitewash and feign remorse.² It is a slick of grease floating with other slicks of grease atop an international soup, which the actual victims and their descendants are too ashamed to sniff.

Switzerland as an island? A Switzerland that’s ensnared in one way or another in all the world’s destructive schemes – and those of Europe in particular? An island possesses civil courage, bravery, and humanity; meanwhile, my people are still called Gypsy whores and can therefore be thrown from moving trains with impunity (as happened to me on 16 June 1997, near Zurich). An island welcomes refugees; it does not lock them up and torture them for months before deporting them back to their war-torn countries in violation of every human right. To be an island in Europe, specifically, would mean backing up noble talk with actions, and ensuring that Jews are never publicly insulted, slandered or threatened again.

I would have liked to call an island like that my home. Alas, Switzerland is not that. But this only heightens my admiration for all those poets and thinkers and friends who continue to persevere and hope. I fled from this hope because, for me, it has degenerated into an obscene illusion.

Phralalen, Pejalen Mama

Quante Mamera,³

My brain is not a savings account into which I can deposit our memories and then move on. For me, each new day means trying again, and each brings another lesson. I am still learning how to live with these memories – yours, mine and those of our people – without being broken by them.

Mamera, they broke you. It was never going to be possible for you to reach 60, depleted as you were by remembering. They poisoned you with their perverse ideas about law and order until your death, their final test.

The records of your life, neatly ordered by the authorities, are set on my desk now, stapled together in a teacherly fashion, bound in orange folders, their spines labelled: Maria Emma Mehr, born 27 August 1924, from Almens, Graubünden, died 1983 in Zurich. Classification: Member of the Yenish people. In other words, an Inferior, begotten by Inferiors; the scum of the earth, from a racial-biological standpoint. The correctional hierarchy stamped their boot prints on your naked skin. Is there a higher honour for this pile of filth?

They danced along the scaffolding of your heart, then climbed inside and contaminated it. You lost yourself. All that was left to do was carve your silent suffering into the only place that seemed safe, somewhere they could not print their booted hooves or keep any records. Because this was a place they could not believe your kind possessed: the soul.

“A dog’s life” was what you called your steady descent into self-hatred, to assert that people like you could be more than dogs, more than absolute and utter filth, that you had a soul. You hadn’t fully lost the ability to dream. You still knew that elsewhere, life was lived differently. Elsewhere, it was forbidden to think of other people as filth, or to use them as shovels for burying filth, as your people were used. But in the end the authorities buried you as well.

Your people’s self-pity didn’t help when the charity’s lowlier officials, flush with their show of brotherly love, pulled out of the place they had made for themselves in your body, left your heart’s nest, which they had occupied all your life. Your heart’s nest – where they ravaged your ancestors’ seed, which they called inferior heredity, denied your harvest by raining lightning and hail down from their mouths; performed exorcisms even though there was no devil to be found, just incendiary heredity, which led your people to move through the woods, to gather roots and berries, which now had to be turned into a feast.

But they drove berry-picking and root-gathering out of you. They spat and trampled on your childhood spirit, put out its spark, and taught you how to fear. Just as they tore children away from their mothers’ breasts and placed them in the homes of ‘superior’ citizens – people whose heredity brought honour to the country, and who upheld law and order.

This country celebrated on that fateful day, decades ago, when war broke out in Germany – the day of the death sentence, to which your people, your German cousins, were subject. What do you have to complain about, they would say, it’s not your neck they’re after. The Swiss Country Roads⁴ were cleared by dutiful Christians who, every now and then, raised their hands to the sky and said, “Holy God, we praise Thy name,” to honour the chief executioner they had shaped in their own image. Their God oversaw the eternal division of human beings into the Valuable and the Inferior – and condoned the latter’s murder.

He was a good man, they said of that ‘street sweeper’ who worked for Pro Juventute. He was so devoted to your people, so caring, his heirs claim. Never mind that his care suffocated your people, drove them insane. Why should that matter to the ‘superior’ citizens who have never known anything about berry-picking or root-gathering? Today, in fact, they claim they knew nothing about anything – nothing of the mass graves overflowing with this century’s uninvited guests, nothing of the ravaged loins of your brothers and sisters, nothing of the ripped-out bowels of these subhumans, nothing of their pleas and prayers for their children who were tortured to death.

Besides, suffering brought your people closer to Jesus – theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Sweet little Jesus: your people were roasted on his flaming heart. How could our humble fires – fed by driftwood, gifted to us by kindly streams and rivers – have protected us from their hunger, their will to impose order, to chain your people’s wounded feet to gravestones, to burden their every step?

The love of the Yenish mother, they said, is primitive and animalistic, in need of punishment. And so they sterilised you after the birth of your second child. At the age of 12, my brother hung himself in a home for the mentally handicapped because he could no longer bear to live a life without warmth. He wasn’t able to resist in any other way.

Nineteen twenty-four, the year of your birth. Marshland flattened by wind, bleak. A dull, drunken freedom in the wingbeat of herons; the long, drawn-out cry of a hawk flying above the sparse woods; and the bloodhounds, approaching your humble dwelling. That same year, the draft of a law permitting the killing of the mentally ill was discussed in Germany’s government offices.⁵ By the following year, Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization, subtitled “The Menace of the Underman”, and Meltzer’s Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life had become cult classics.

Like Zeus with Athena, the medicine man birthed the master race. They sent their tentacles into the heart of Switzerland, gave public lectures promoting the forced sterilisation of Yenish men and women. Statistics about so-called vagabond clans piled up in federal archives. People like you were preemptively catalogued and registered as criminals; banned from peddling; and sent to labour camps or insane asylums for the smallest violations. The Yenish culture and way of life were defamed as the spawn of a diseased stock. Psychiatry, until then a marginal and unserious academic discipline, at last found its purpose. It was baptised in a climate of xenophobia, nationalist arrogance and master-race delusions. It granted the era absolution for its most horrific crimes – the mass murder of your kind, the Inferiors.

“We are depopulating the Country Road,” proclaimed Dr. Alfred Siegfried in 1926. He was the head street sweeper of Pro Juventute. Jeering and making the sign of the cross, his cleaning brigade fanned out across the Swiss mountain valleys. With the blessing of the church and of psychiatry, they purged the Country Roads of pests like yourself, enemies of the people, the bright-smelling dung of a dark freedom. From then on, Heimat was like a creature fleeing hunters. It crawled into hedges at night and bottled up its dung and cheerful winds, lived in a state of permanent constipation, until finally it died.

In 1933, a law was passed prohibiting hereditarily diseased offspring, mandating euthanasia for people like you.⁶ They began hunting the allegedly asocial, vagrant, beggarly and work-shy.

Gypsy women are dangerous, morally depraved, lust-crazed man-eaters, they said. Yet a Christian drove his stake into your juvenile flesh and scattered his hereditarily sound seed there – onto your face and into your unfinished girl’s body – transplanting your kind into “healthy soil”. In went the domineering club. To knock or ask for permission from a person like you – what a joke.

We were never innocent. Our original sin was not washed away at our baptism – we carried it throughout our lives, we Inferiors, whose hair falls long over our shoulders and whose bodies still exude the scent of berries and roots just consumed. We who display all the shamelessness of the oppressed. Even if your body had been your Heimat – that worn-out word – you would have left it behind, found your way into nothingness, clothed only in a bundle of original sin.

In asylums, your memory was corrected, your heart robbed of its truth. The white gods decreed that your people must not have memories, only guilt. They must feel guilty all the time – for existing at all, for existing for too long, for violating their Heimat, for stealing their sun. “She thinks she’s a beauty, she wears her hair loose,” the authorities at Bellechasse prison wrote about you in 1945. “So we don’t need to rush to release her from custody.” It was one of the dozens of wild dumps that swallowed up people like you, the trash that Pro Juventute had swept off the streets.

In the absence of harsher and clearer racist laws, this trash had to be fed and clothed. So lamented Pro Juventute’s beloved Siegfried in his monthly reports: “We could not send them to Africa; therefore, we ask our esteemed patrons for warm shoes and winter clothing for our poorest wards” – for people like you, Mamera, who had outgrown children’s clothes and could not be sent to Africa. The brownshirt neighbours changed their minds and came up with a new plan⁷ for their national plague: the Jews, whose women were just as dangerous, lust-crazed and man-hungry as yours, those disgraceful crucifiers of Christ. They weren’t going to burn in the blazing heat of the African sun, no. They burned in the German dumps, after work had set them free and gas had killed them. Their inferiority was purified in fire.

You survived the war – that most monstrous mass murder in which so many of your people perished – in a Swiss prison. The clean-up men of the Helvetic nation then placed you under permanent care to treat your “pathologies”, after you briefly tasted freedom and brought me into the world – you had to be punished. When I was born, my forehead was branded: one of your kind.

Your cries for help from workhouses and asylums; your curses, pleas and whimpers; your despair and useless self-blame – they lie before me now, in letters you wrote that never reached me. Trash only produces trash: the pages turned yellow inside orange folders marked “Not Forwarded”. They yellowed like my own letters, which never reached you, and had their own folders: “Mother of mine, my beloved mother, open the little door to your heart’s nest, so that I can be warm, too.” How could I have known that other beings had moved into your heart and were contaminating it; how could I have known that the street sweepers were whoring around at night with their Christian cocks. Until, finally, night settled over your mind.

Tell me, what was it like to turn away and, pacified by madness, mock reality one last time with your cry: “I know, I know, it’s my fault”? The raging in your heart was over. They continued fucking a dead woman, those rapists, for your soul had returned to Riedland, to the marshland flattened by comforting winds, to hear the long, drawn-out cry of the hawk over the woods; for you – berry-gatherer, joyous, laughing woman – had rekindled our fires anew.

Dog years – 59 dog years – that is what you called your allotted time on earth, for which the term “life” was not appropriate. No flower bloomed in your dreams and no smile brightened your forced confinement. In that room darkened by fear and despair, you were hardly allowed to relax and just be. You were left with the language of aardwolves, pitch-black and shrill, far removed from communication. You weren’t begging for life, you told people later, on the streets, once you were out, you just wanted a moment of peace between the long phases of inner agitation. You were certain that you could never measure up to this world, which only had workhouses and asylums for “people like you”. Deinesgleichen: one word, four syllables that disfigured your face when you deliberately elongated them and let your mouth grow wide in unspoken scorn.

I have a birthday to celebrate, your 60th, which you were not allowed to. Lacio drom, Mamera. Bàchtàlo drom, you brave woman. I wish you happiness and peace, and a long death.

Only the living have to remember.

1. Mehr is likely referring to the “beggar hunts” that took place in Zurich until the end of the 18^th century, where travellers were rounded up, mutilated and then expelled or even executed.
2. This remark alludes to the intense national debates surrounding the Holocaust in Switzerland in the late 1990s. The country’s wartime role – particularly its refugee policy and acceptance of looted assets – was increasingly scrutinized, even as efforts to whitewash complicity persisted. In her 1987 essay, “On the Aversion to Sensuality in Clay-Pigeon Shooting,” Nehr describes borders that were “open to melted-down victim gold” but closed to Roma, Sinti, Yenish and Jews seeking asylum.
3. The title is a Romani phrase, which roughly translates to: “My brothers, let me tell you about my mother.” The following address, “Quante Mamera,” is Yenish and means “Dear Mother.”
4. A play on "Charity for the Children of the Country Road”.
5. No historical record has been found of this draft law. It’s not clear what Mehr is referring to.
6. The 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) mandated the forced sterilization of those classified as “hereditarily ill”. Mehr’s formulation collapses this ruling with the later euthanasia programs, framing it as one point on a longer continuum of racial-hygiene policies.
7. After the Fall of France in 1940, the Nazis briefly entertained the idea of sending all of Europe’s Jews to Madagascar (the so-called “Madagascar Plan”). Similar ideas had been floated in nationalist circles in Europe since the First World War; Siegfried’s reference suggests that he was considering the same “solution” for the Yenish. That said, there does not seem to be evidence that Pro Juventute planned to send Yenish children to Africa. So it’s not clear what Mehr is referring to.