It is rather obligatory that one might associate the infamous scene of Rätsel der Urwaldhölle (1938) with the well acclaimed Schreibstunden out of the Nambikwara chapter in Tristes Tropiques (1955) by French anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, when the self-claimed ethnologist and adventurer Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, in the midst of the deepest eastern Amazon jungle makes the indigenous Aparai Pituma, whom he calls ironically “Winnetou”, draw in his travel diary with a small pencil. While with Lévi-Strauss speaking the handwriting of the indigenous Nambikwara people represents a symbol of new acquired western power, it is rather different in the case of marginal ethnographic figures like Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel, Senta Dinglreiter or Ernst Schäfer, who attempt to bring out the exotic alterity in human ego and pay an explicit homage to a far more Eurocentric exoticism shaped by nationalistic or fascistic stereotypes and encounter in their exotic adventures simply “people with prejudices, desires, motivations, and affects and precisely not entire ‘cultures’ that encounter each other” (Castro 2020: 157). Even if Hans Fischer (2003: 129f. ) claims that an analysis of travel and adventure books published during the late Weimar Republic and the early Third Reich is hardly worthwhile as a research object, a comparative analysis with ethnographic and anthropological works written at the same time like Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss or L’Afrique Fantôme (1934) by Michel Leiris reveal the bizarre attempt to reproduce a familiar Eurocentric homeland within a far away exotic cultural area and therefore evoke sort of a “cultural translation” (Castro 2020: 87), in which contemporary readers are made familiar with “cultural aspects of foreign cultures” (ibid.) by transferring “the unknown into the known” (Ibid.).

The here presented research project attempts to turn out 1) the contrast between scientific and cultural exoticism as well as 2) aspects of a reversible exoticism by 3) analyzing numerous examples of ethnological adventure and travel literature before and during The Third Reich. The aim of this project is to make clear that exoticism, which until now has been used with a rather positive connotation, should be interpreted in a revised form as a topos of a forgotten literary genre that has received nearly no attention in related contemporary research.