The Conquest of Fantasy" depicts the rise and fall of the German colonial empire as imagined in popular culture. It is a story that has been told, retold and transformed in countless travelogues and novels, some works of the avantgarde as well as in popular cinema between the 1880s and the 1920s. It is a story of brief encounters, random experiences, adventure and ambiguous desire rather than one of a "grand récit." Nevertheless, it left its traces in the very basis of fantasy itself, reshaping it from being a setting for desire into a powerful tool of appropriation.