`The German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against'

Abstract

At first glance Greenmantle , John Buchan's 1916 novel of war and high adventure, seems a fairly conventional Boy's Own tale of wartime daring and heroism, in which a plucky band of British patriots attempt to foil a dastardly German plan to topple the British Empire. But a closer reading of the text reveals a much more complex set of themes and attitudes, especially regarding the Germans. Far from conforming with the negative stereotypes of the Germans prevalent in wartime, Buchan presents his readers with a complex set of representations of German characters which can be read as challenging and undermining established prewar and wartime conceptions of the Germans in British popular culture. This essay examines the ways in which the Germans are represented in Greenmantle in order to assess to what extent these representations conform to or challenge contemporary stereotypes, and indeed to what extent Buchan's German characters are typically or specifically German.