In 1879, eight years after the Franco-Prussian War, Jules Verne published his novel Les Cinc Cents Millions de la Bégum, confronting the philantropic Frenchman Dr. Sarrasin with the cold-blooded, arrogant and brutal German professor Schultze. In doing so, the author wanted to show the moral superiority of his country over what was then termed its “hereditary enemy”. Despite this problematic topic, Verne’s novel was translated to German for the first time in the same year; two more retranslations appeared in 1901 and 1967, respectively. One aim of this master’s thesis is to show how – in an effort to render the translation as close as possible to the original while also avoiding to offend their readers – the German speaking translators coped with the negative image of Germany (and the positive image of France). For this purpose, I use André Lefevere’s descriptive model to show under what circumstances literary works are created and translated. Another focus is put on the so-called retranslation hypothesis, established in the early nineties of the last century by French translator Antoine Berman and claiming that first translations always tend to be domesticating whereas later retranslations have a more foreignizing character. In this thesis I will put his thesis to test, looking for foreignizing and domesticating elements in all three translations. Furthermore, I try to reconstruct the reasons why the first translation of Verne’s novel was followed by two more German translations in the following ninety years.