ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with literary and cultural discourses that stage a range of positions towards the Germans within a broader debate about foreignness'. For a brief period before the First World War, the Germans served as a short-lived example of how nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity might evolve into early twentieth-century ideas of cultural hybridity. Elizabeth von Arnim's bestselling pre-war novels about Germans and Germany serve as a useful foil to Forster's vision, feeding Edwardian interest in national character and introducing her audience to the Teutonic sub-species of the Prussian Junker. Von Arnim's work also enables us to examine an important distinction in the representation of accessible foreignness: the Germans being perceived as foreign in England and the English experiencing themselves as foreign when in Germany. In The Caravaners, however at the height of von Arnim's financial difficulties and marital tensions the Junker ventures to England and proves an embarrassing spectacle.
