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Peters, Jürgen. Jürgen Peters appeared in the German dime novel Jürgen Peters der Schiffsjunge #1-448 (1914-1923).

Jürgen Peters is a fifteen-years-old ship’s boy who sails before the mast in the 1870s and 1880s. He is a crew member on the Sturmvogel (Storm Bird), which sails around the world and encounters a wide variety of adventures, some verging on the fantastic (a trip to “the island of wild pigs”), some drawn on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and some invoking other creators’ stories (an encounter with the Curupuri Professor Challenger fought). The Sturmvogel is helmed by Kapitan Schlüter and Peters’ best friend, Oll Kopp, is the ship’s helmsman. He travels across the American West and Africa in a balloon (with a reference to Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon), finds a living Cyclops, and visits “Horror Island.” Peters finds Lost Race Ophir and meets the New Robinson. Peters fights headhunters in Borneo, pirate islands, Yellow Perils in Hong Kong, kaiju-sized wild boars, creepy red dwarfs, sinister black dwarfs, “the Wizard of Yalta,” the living mummy of Luxor, Cossacks in the Caucasus, a new Jack the Ripper, Apaches, evil Mormons, an aviator version of the Flying Dutchman, and the “black Prophet” and his fanatical Muslim warriors.

There is some antisemitism and racism in the stories.

Peters appears in stories with titles like “The Night of Terror in Mexico,” “The Mummy of Luxor,” and “The Flight To New Mexico.”

* I'm including Jürgen Peters der Schiffsjunge in the Best of the Encyclopedia list because of the imaginative content in the heftroman. It's quite regrettable that Jürgen Peters had as much antisemitic and racist content as it did, because otherwise the heftroman is a great idea of the ideasplosive adventure heftroman. It's got crossovers, it's got fantastic concepts (and some, like the kaiju-sized wild boars, avant la lettre), it's got High Pulp adventure in abundance, it's got twists on traditional concepts (like the aviator Flying Dutchman), and it's got enough nautical adventure to satisfy any C.S. Forester or Patrick O'Brian fan in the reading audience. Jürgen Peters should have been an all-timer. But there's just too much racism and antisemitism for that. 

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