Horror Infiniti. Die Zigeuner als Europas Trickster

The figure of trickster is well known to all folklore traditions round the world, even among Romanispeaking groups as beng (devil) like in the Mediterranean and Balkan context. But the focus of thearticle concerns the transformation of Roma and other Gypsies themselves into tricksters, whichcan be shown in three examples: 1) Gypsies in the literature of the Italian Renaissance, 2) Gypsiesin the Rumanian Tsiganiada of the early 19th century and 3) the Gypsy cliché in the ethnographyof the 20th century, which comes near to the bricoleur of Lévi-Strauss or to an indefinable entitycomparable with the irrational numbers in mathematics.