author
Engelbert Wittich
1878–1937
A German writer from a Yenish family, he wrote vivid, firsthand accounts about itinerant life, the Jenisch language, and Sinti communities at a time when such perspectives were rarely published. His work still stands out for its closeness to everyday experience and its attempt to correct popular myths.
2 Audiobooks
Blicke in das Leben der Zigeuner Von einem Zigeuner
by Engelbert Wittich
Die jenische Sprache
by Engelbert Wittich
About the author
Born on April 18, 1878, in Lützenhardt and died on March 4, 1937, in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Engelbert Wittich was a German writer known above all for his writing on the Jenisch language and on Sinti life. He came from a traveling family that supported itself through brushmaking, basket work, and seasonal peddling, and that background shaped the subjects he chose to document.
Wittich is remembered for works including Die jenische Sprache and Blicke in das Leben der Zigeuner. His writing drew on close personal knowledge and aimed to give readers a more direct view of communities that were often misrepresented in mainstream writing of his time.
Alongside his literary work, he also painted, and his life has been preserved in regional and literary reference sources as that of a distinctive observer of marginalized worlds in Germany. Today, his books remain of interest not only as historical texts, but also as rare voices from within the culture he described.