Passport plots: B. Traven's Das Totenschiff and the chronotope of movement control

This article analyses B. Traven's 1926 novel Das Totenschiff in the light of its persistent references to the emerging international passport system of the interwar period. Building on Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, understood in this context as a principle of narrative organisation, I argue that these references can be analysed productively as a ‘chronotope of movement control’ – that is, an interface linking a specific historical movement control regime and a specific mode of literary expression. Pursuant to this idea, I provide an overview of contemporaneous passport and movement control practices and proceed on this basis to demonstrate how these practices are not merely documented in Traven's novel, but activated as a means of articulating its spatial, narrative and thematic dimensions. By way of conclusion, I offer a broader characterisation of the novel's chronotopical strategy of emplotment while at the same time sketching its place within a hitherto unacknowledged tradition in European literary history of actively engaging with movement control as one of the defining institutions of modernity.