„Dieses merkwürdige Land zwischen den Wendekreisen“: German Travel Literature about Mexico during National Socialism. Colin Ross (1937) and Josef Maria Frank (1938).

Travel literature has deep roots in German literary tradition, and it continued during the National Socialist period (1933-1945). Traveling to foreign countries didn’t stop during the brutal years of the Nazi regime. Quite the opposite: The surrounding world, including remote countries such as Mexico, was closely observed not only by politicians, but also by many literary authors, adventurers and explorers who took advantage of the absence of renowned exiled writers to impulse their own careers. In the context of the Nazi demagogic policy known as Kraft durch Freude, many travelogues were written to promote tourism. The vision of political and cultural transformations and tensions around the globe were deeply influenced by the geopolitical approach that the Nazi foreign policy had gained. After the end of the Mexican Revolution, which had a significant impact on European and American intellectuals for being the first socialist uprising even before the Russian Revolution, the German explorer Colin Ross decided to go to Mexico in 1936 to observe closely the social and cultural changes that the country had experienced during post-revolutionary regimes. From this experience he published Der Balkan Amerikas (1937). Two years later, he was followed by the novelist Josef Maria Frank, who in his travelogue Mexiko ist anders. Reise ins Land der Azteken (1938) mixes his anecdotes with political commentaries and reflections. Colin Ross und Josef Maria Frank travelogues, the only texts about Mexico from the Nazi Period known to have been read in that country, need to be read as a result of a literary tradition emerged in the Reiselust of the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the numerous German migrations, travels and adventures of the former centuries that created new poetic forms in German letters and arts. Although travelogues have deep roots in European literature, this genre went through important changes in its poetic forms and rhetoric in Nazi Germany. Frank und Ross travelogues are particularly anecdotic, yet they are transformed into a sort of geopolitical essay, in which the authors show the deep influence that Nazism had on their language and esthetics. In the other hand, they adopted words and concepts from German adventure novels from the 19th century, the German Colonial Discourse and even ancient Aztec myths. My dissertation project analyses how these transfers take place, such as the use of German words like Indianer, whose origin is to be found in adventure novels of authors such as Karl May, and how this interact with the Spanish concept Indio to create different semiotic dimensions of the same referent. The use of Aztec myths, in particular of Gods like Huitzilopochtli (The God Sun) and Quetzalcóatl (The Plumed Serpent, God of the Wind), are used by Frank und Ross as metaphors to explain the contemporary political and cultural transformations of Mexico, in which white Mexicans and foreigners (mainly of European and American origin) are confronted by the social emancipation of Mestizos (racially mixed Mexicans) and Indians in a process which Ross and Frank conceive as a sort of racial war, a concept coined by the Prussian Officer Lothar von Trotta during the Herero Uprising in German South-West Africa. Finally my dissertation analyses the reception of these works in Germany and in Mexico, while building a context that helps to understand the popularity and impact that these kind of travelogues had in German public during National Socialism and in Mexico in the 1930s.