Daheim? Sinti in Freiburg

In the 1950s and 1960s, Freiburg suffered from a severe housing shortage. Poor families and refugees in particular lived under miserable conditions on the outskirts of the city. They were officially referred to as “Freiburg Gypsies.” Well into the 1970s, the centuries-old discrimination against the Freiburg Sinti was manifested architecturally in this dense cluster of extremely substandard houses on the western edge of the city.

SWR archive footage reflects and reinforces all prevailing prejudices. After years of demands for adequate housing, the city initiated a pilot project: the Auggener Weg was built in the newly developed high-rise district of Freiburg-Weingarten. What was initially considered stylish and modern was soon labeled a ghetto: “many foreigners, social hotspot, anonymity, crime, unclean…”—this is the narrative that was told about Weingarten then and continues to be told today.

This is also the story told by Manuel Reinhardt—but somehow in a very different way.