In the youth novel "Monika fährt nach Madagaskar" (1931), Max Mezger relates the adventures of a German girl who travels with her father to Madagascar. The text has been translated into several languages and, with some significant variations, regularly reissued until the 1960s. Both the original and its French translation respectively adaptation are characterized by the experience of alterity, witch can be observed in the descriptions of the tropical island and the self- and foreign portrayals of France and Germany. The paper discusses the images of the neighboring country and the French colony presented to the young German and French readers in the different editions. It is also pointed out that the depictions of the foreigners developed on both sides of the Rhine depend on the ideological and political context of the new editions.