ABSTRACT
Appearing in the organ of the United German Examining Board for Youth Literature the Jugendschriften-Warte in 1900, this commentary referred to the mass visual culture that was a relatively novel phenomenon for the time. In an unprecedented manner, a fl ood of images made its way into the daily lives of people for whom the most important media, besides the aforementioned commercial collectors’ cards and picture postcards, were (press) photography, newspaper and book illustrations, photo folders, stamps, caricatures, comics, posters, or advertising graphics. The “moving cards,” or fi lm, did not emerge as a mass medium until the late 1920s. Collectors’ cards, which evolved “from children’s playthings to highly desired collectibles, with a fervor that spread like an epidemic throughout the whole of Europe,” are the subject of this in-depth examination. 2 This chapter examines this new mass medium, in particular, commercial collectors’ cards with colonial and exotic motifs. In the age of high imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the emerging advertising industry preferred to use colonialist motifs to catch the eye of customers and incite them to buy products, but also to inspire national-imperial pride, erotic fascination, or laughter.
