Exploring the Interwar World: The Travelogues of Colin Ross (1885-1945)

The project aims at reconstructing the work of Colin Ross (1885-1945), a popular travelogue film maker, travel book author and public lecturer. Rosss immense oeuvre is both paradigmatic for Weimar culture and, at the same time, allows for identifying unique tendencies in geopolitical thought rooted in the conservative revolution of modernist Germany. By using a profound self-marketing in producing and promoting his travelogue films, books and lectures, and leaning on the disseminative potentials of major film companies, publishing houses, magazines and associations, Ross strived not only to medially fathom the possibilities of the culture industry but also to elaborate on an own set of ideas that can be described as a transitive ideology between colonial tradition close to Nazi considerations and the global thought. Thus, the main goal of the project is to critically interpret the interrelations between popular culture and the social, cultural and ideological settings as exemplified on the case of Rosss travelogues in the Weimar period. Based on the available copies and Rosss film estate deposited at the Austrian Film Museum, the project will first of all collate a corpus of archival materials so that to achieve a preferably precise identification of the film stock. Along with these data, his writings (books, articles and reports in illustrated journals, and their translations) and his lectures will be recorded with annotations in a database. In the second stage of the project, an historical- critical analysis of Rosss oeuvre will be delivered: thereby, the appraisal will concentrate not only on Rosss filmic and textual travelogue production in view of its discursive and tropological design, on the medial hybridization in his works, and on his particular institutional marketing strategies, but also on geopolitical topics by highlighting his arguments in the context of contemporary geopolitical discourses. The results of the project will be presented in an open access database and disseminated in international workshops and university courses.

To research the popular culture phenomenon Colin Ross (1885-1945)a travelogue author, filmmaker, and lecturer famous in his time and all but forgotten sincewe retrieved both his work and the coverage of it and situated it within the contemporary media industries and geopolitical discourse. Historian Bodo-Michael Baumunk, in his political biography of Ross, had already unearthed and studied a treasure trove of materials, mostly of a political nature. As our project, conducted at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society (LBIGG), was centered on Ross as a mass-cultural phenomenon, capturing his widespread and long-lasting media presence was essential. The materials collected and retrieved in the course of the project, c. 3,600 items in all, substantially enlarged Rosss media trail, extending it as far back as 1910 (the earliest coverage of his worka reviewdates from 1912). This collection has now been made accessible through the project website colinrossproject.net in an online exhibition presenting a curated selection of more than 500 annotated media objects and in a library containing all retrieved items. Particularly the plethora of articles in periodicals, in a number of languages, gives a sense of Rosss popularity and, by implication, the success of marketing the Ross brand. Archival sources were significant, too, notably the minutes of Rosss frequent, albeit irregular, meetings with his book publisher, the Leipzig-based F.A. Brockhaus company, between 1927 and 1943. This source permitted a rare, backstage lookseen through the eyes of the Brockhaus managementon the considerations and decisions that went into his marketing at a time when Rosss popularity was soaring. A main focus of the project lay on Ross as a filmmaker and the film materials held in the Austrian Film Museum and other archives. The projects research results place Rosss work firmly both in the Weimar Republic, with its craving for foreign travel reports and a market beyond the book trades traditional Bildungs-oriented readership, and the Third Reich, when Ross increasingly aligned himself with NS propaganda. However, travel and propaganda were no separate phenomena for Ross ever since he started sending his eyewitness reports of the First Balkan War, in late 1912, to German newspapers and lectured about these experiences. Naturally, the balance of travel experiences, (geo)political reflections, and propaganda shifted, depending on political context, medium, purpose and/or target audience. Surveying his career one can nonetheless detect a gradual change in favor of propaganda. This slow displacement of lived experience with socio-political comments may seem reminiscent of the New Objectivity that informed much German travel reporting of the interwar years. But the emphasis on facts, statistics, and other authenticating elements of travel reports in this style played an increasingly negligible role in Rosss work. Besides a prominent irrational, supernatural streak or his often unsubstantiated sources, if any, his embracement of Nazism, in 1933, undoubtedly pushed Ross to eventually transform his travel reporting, in print, film or lecture, and put it at the service of its political program.