Carefully removing a bullet from the side of a runaway slave named Jim, he sits down to light his pipe. A red-headed boy with bright eyes and ragged clothes asks if he’s a doctor.

“No, I’m not a doctor,” the man says.

The boy puts out his hand. “I’m Huck,” he says. “Huckleberry Finn.”

“Mark Twain,” the man replies. “I write stories.”

Most German viewers of “The Adventures of Huck Finn” will have already known that. Director Hermine Huntgeburth says she added Twain to give the story’s end a “peaceful quality.” But it also introduces a figure who’s arguably better known in Germany than the characters he created.

Winfried Fluck, a professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Berlin’s Free University, says Twain is often the first person to come to mind when Germans think of Americans.

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