In Never-Never Land

Peter Pan has always been a popular Stoff in the Anglo-American area. In Germany, on the other hand, it took much longer for him to gain popularity. In this article, the history of Peter Pan’s origins and distribution is traced. Until 1945, it was primarily the theatre play translated into German, a film adaptation, and the translation of some chapters from a novel published under the title Peter Pan im Waldpark that found their way into the German public. For this reason, this article also provides an outlook on the publication situation after 1945. The contribution does not take a biographically oriented perspective, but rather a text-oriented one, from which the structure and development of the literary figure Peter Pan as a “transworld identity” Giesa (Doležel, Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, Md, 1998, 17) repeatedly comes into view.