Belonging to the interwar world: Tracing the travelogues of Colin Ross

Abstract

This article reflects on the results of a two-year research project on German journalist, writer, filmmaker, and lecturer of travelogues as well as self-styled geopolitical expert and Nazi propagandist Colin Ross (1885-1945). Besides a brief portrayal of a career that spanned the two world wars, it elaborates on the project’s most comprehensive research result, its website. Both database and collection of thematic, annotated media objects from Ross’s large output in books, articles, films, and lectures it considers its implications for research on the international dimension of his work. The article presents his career as an opportunity to contribute to an evaluation of what German archivist Hans Booms called the documentary heritage of the countries and regions Ross sojourned: to what extent did the archival traces he and the companies and authorities he contracted and negotiated with contributed to his significance for literary, media or other local histories. The traces of Ross’s journalism, books, film releases, and lectures in Dutch repositories is presented as a case study of the relevance of Booms’s archival notion and a plea for bringing to the fore the local effects of the international traffic of ideas and viewpoints.