In this work the passive in German and English novels is examined by contrastive and translation-scientific criteria. For the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus an extended passive concept is developed that includes three passive types: the process passive, the state passive and the passive paraphrase. The results show that the passive is in both languages a multi-functional means, of which the use in epic texts is affected by the literary presentation form. Apart from the detailed analysis of the text functions the potential translation equivalents of the different passive types are determined and the factors and conditions are examined.