EXOTIC FAR-OFF LANDS, unexplored jungles, vast and timeless wastelands. Images of foreign realms have long captured the human imagination and have been a vital part of Western cinema since its inception. Travelogues and foreign adventure films bring viewers to places they would most likely never visit and allow them to share in the allure of exploration. The adventure film offers viewers the prospect of danger, intrigue, and conquest without ever leaving the safety of the movie theater. Both documentary expedition films and fictional travel adventures follow a similar narrative pattern: a Western European man travels to uncharted territory in Africa, Asia, or South America, where he conquers a wild land and captures its image and natural treasures. The explorer meets natives and distinguishes his own racial and cultural identity from that of a people he considers primitive. Traveling with the adventurer, viewers are given the opportunity to explore blank spaces on the map and experience the thrill of being in a strange new place where the unimaginable seems possible. In the encounter between the European traveler and the native, adventure films visualize popular notions of gender, race, and power surrounding national identity.

In Nazi Germany, the adventure film was a small but significant film genre. Comprising only 11.2 % of the entire film production between 1933 and 1945, the adventure film rarely delivered record-breaking success at the box office, but the German film industry supplied a steady fare of such films and supplemented its own production with Hollywood imports. In 1938 and 1939 the adventure film reached its zenith, constituting 16.2% and 18.5% respectively of the yearly film production. As the Third Reich expanded its borders, annexed Austria (March 13, 1938) and the Sudetenland (September 29, 1938), marched into Bohemia and Moravia (March 15, 1939), invaded the Memelland (March 23, 1939), and finally attacked Poland launching the Second World War (September 1, 1939), German cinemas featured more adventure films than ever before or after. These stories about explorers, treasure hunters, and colonists embarking on a perilous journey into the unknown belong to a larger discourse at home and abroad central to Nazi ideology and imperial conquest.