ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Colin Ross’s published writings, media coverage, and unpublished archival documents, as well as what little secondary literature on the Rosses has already been written, to tease out the threefold significance of “comrade” Lisa to this immensely popular, if by virtually forgotten body of travel writing. It aims to contextualise the gender positionings of Lisa Ross both in public and behind the scenes against the backdrop of Weimar era mass culture, with its new liberties as well as conservative burgerliche conceptions of gender and family. Lisa Peter met Colin Ross, four years her senior, while studying in Heidelberg, where they both obtained their doctorates from national economist Eberhard Gothein. Both Lisa and Colin Ross came from solid bourgeois backgrounds, her father being a banker in Karlsruhe, and his father a German electrical engineer who resided in Vienna for much of his professional life.