For around 500 years, literature, the visual arts, music, the so-called Romani studies, and finally film have repeatedly propagated the same clichés about "Gypsies": the witch-like fortune teller, the beautiful dancer, or the vagabond and magical fiddler embody notions of freedom and wildness, but also of archaic life and creaturely need. It is not the reality of life for Sinti and Roma, Manouches, or Kalderash that serves as the basis for these constructions, but rather the fantasies of the majority about a minority that have been uncritically copied and passed down for centuries. The "Gypsies" in novels and paintings, in operas and operettas, in television crime dramas, in youth literature, and in travel literature appear as artifacts that seemingly serve the majority society as indispensable negative orientations for self-understanding.