In 1961, Walt Disney Productions released The Parent Trap, a story of identical thirteen-year-old twins, Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick, who meet for the first time at a summer camp and gradually realise they are sisters (separated at birth) whose divorced parents took custody of one child each. Curious and eager to meet each other's parent, the girls decide to trade places – Susan goes to Boston masquerading as Sharon, Sharon goes to Carmel (California) pretending to be Susan – whereupon the twins devise a plan to reconcile their estranged parents and re-create an ideal family unit. With Hayley Mills starring in the dual role of twins, The Parent Trap was a huge popular and commercial success for the Disney studio: it was theatrically reissued in 1968, and subsequently extended through two television sequels, The Parent Trap II and III (1986, 1989). Moreover, it was remade (by Disney) in 1998, ‘introducing’ Lindsay Lohan in the twin role (in this case) of Annie James and Hallie Parker, raised respectively in London and California. Perhaps less well known is that Disney's 1961 version of The Parent Trap was itself already a remake of German, Japanese and British versions – Das doppelte Lottchen (1950), Hibari no komoriuta (1951) and Twice Upon a Time (1953) – each in turn derived from Erich Kastner's 1949 novel Das doppelte Lottchen (published in English translation as Lottie and Lisa). While the cultural production does not end here – with subsequent versions reported in India, Iran and Korea, and animated and live-action remakes in Germany and Japan – this chapter inquires into the transnational connections between Kastner's novel and the American and German versions (originals and remakes). While the doppelganger is a familiar figure in German fiction, this chapter extends its analysis beyond Kastner's twin figures of Lotte and Luise to chart not only a cartography of transnational flows – a political economy of textual production and reception – but also indicate the way in which the exchange of twins – Lotte (Lottie) and Luise (Lisa), Susan and Sharon, Charlotte and Louise, Annie and Hallie – is symptomatic of that between original and remake.

First published in German as Das doppelte Lottchen (1949), Erich Kastner's children's novel – ‘Ein Roman fur Kinder’, as it is described on the title page – was translated into English as Lottie and Lisa in the following year.