Transpositions between Literature and Cinema: Latin America in the German Imperialist Imaginary, 1890-1945

Abstract

This article studies how images and texts were circulated in the media in Germany’s Wilhelmine
era, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period, based on a number of foundational literary
myths. Among the latter, we focus particularly on the trope of the German migrant and his
encounter with the exotic. We will begin by looking at the narrative focus of several novels
written for popular entertainment (or Trivialliteratur) and which take place in Latin America or
Africa. These regions are signified as ‘empty territory’, as places to be explored by migrants of
German origin who go in search of broader horizons to inhabit (Lebensraum). We then move on
to look at how the same themes are transposed to national socialist cinema. These are images
that, appropriating both adventure novels and its public, make use of the figure of the migrant,
now understood as the «German living abroad» (Auslandsdeutsche), a hero in exile, as well as
the notion of the exotic, as a space with no rights. Their objective is to generate, at an affective
level, resentment over defeat and the sacralization of revenge