Travel, as Kristi Siegel has pointed out, “generally entails going to another culture, and travel writing is—in large measure—the record of what one sees on that journey.” Yet what one “sees,” Peter J. Brenner argues, is never just about the discovery of the foreign, but always also about homegrown fears and fantasies—so much so that travel literature has been characterized by Klaus Wolterstorff as “a particularly authentic way of self description.” Patterns of perception, assert Siegel and Wulff, are shaped by the horizons of expectation before traveling, social-cultural pressures and conflicts at work in society and in the personality of the traveler. “Vision,” then, “is always culturally mediated.”

Ilse Schreiber's novels about Canada mediate visions sustained by German fears and fantasies of the 1920s and 1930s. Born Ilse Gottwald in 1886, she married the university professor Otto Schreiber, with whom she embarked on a lecture tour through the United States in 1927–28, they also visited Montreal and Saskatchewan, where her sister homesteaded at Frenchman's Butte near Lloydminster. Schreiber became interested in the fate of German immigrants to Canada and started writing about the issues facing them. After the publication of her first novel, Die Schwestern aus Memel: Ein Kanada Roman (The Sisters from Memel: A Canada Novel) in 1936, she went on an extensive tour of Canada in 1937. From Schreiber's novels, visions of Canada emerge that are fueled by ideological viewpoints—Weimar-inspired notions of female agency and racial-colonial constructs resonating with National Socialism.