Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  The belief that Bismarck was a political genius, which became universal among patriotic Germans after the unification of Germany in 1870 and is, I think, correct, would have occurred to almost nobody in 1862 when he became Minister-President of Prussia. But one influential person had seen it much earlier and had a position in the King’s government. General Albrecht von Roon, Minister of War from 1859 to 1873, who met Bismarck first as a teen-ager, understood from the start that this remarkable person had the stuff of greatness. At Roon’s first audience with the Regent and future King of Prussia on 4 December 1858, about his possible appointment as Minister of War,16 he urged the Regent to name Bismarck head of government. And it was Roon who sent the famous telegram of 18 September 1862: ‘periculum in mora. Depêchez-vous!’ (Danger in delay. Make haste!), which gave Bismarck the sign that his hour of destiny had come.

  When Roon’s best friend Clemens Theodor Perthes, professor of law at the University of Bonn and founder of the Protestant ‘inner mission’, berated Roon in April 1864 for having engineered the appointment of a man ‘who calculates so coldly, who prepares so cunningly, who has no scruples about methods’17 Roon replied:

  B. is an extraordinary man, whom I can certainly help, whom I can support and here and there correct, but never replace. Yes, he would not be in the place he now has without me, that is an historical fact, but even with all that he is himself … To construct the parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all.18

  And Bismarck did just that—‘combining it all’.

  Yet genius alone could not win power. No sensible monarch—and King William I of Prussia at the age of 65 had good sense and years of experience—would have appointed Bismarck, who had a reputation for utter unreliability, superficial cleverness and extremely reactionary views, unless he had become desperate. The King’s brother, Frederick William IV wrote in 1848 ‘Bismarck—to be used only when the bayonet rules without limit’19 but in the summer of 1862 a deadlock between the Prussian parliament and the Crown over reform of the army had begun to frighten the royal establishment. Memories of mobs in the streets of Berlin during the revolution of 1848 came back to make the King and court nervous. As the liberal Max Duncker wrote: ‘The military are panting after riots “as the hart panteth after the water-brooks” [Psalm 42, verse 1—JS].’20

  Bismarck gained and held power by the strength and brilliance of his personality but he always depended on the good will of his King. If William I had decided to dismiss Bismarck at the end of September 1862, after the fiasco of ‘the blood and iron speech’, which all the members of the royal family and most educated people in Germany condemned, Bismarck would have disappeared from history and Germany would almost certainly have been unified by a voluntary federation of sovereign princes. If William I had had the decency to die at the biblical ‘three score and ten’ in 1867, Bismarck’s creation, the North German Federation, might have eventually absorbed the South German kingdoms but not through a devastating war. A ‘Liberal Era’ under Emperor/King Frederick III and his energetic Liberal wife, the Princess Royal Victoria of Great Britain, might have begun. We know the list of ministers Frederick wanted to appoint in 1888 when he was already a dying man. All were liberal, which to Bismarck meant the British system of parliamentary government, restricted royal power and the end of his dictatorship. Whether the new Emperor, even if he had been healthy, had the strength of character to resist Bismarck, the Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, had enough for both of them. There would have been a clash, and Bismarck would have been dismissed. Germany might then have followed the British model of liberal parliamentary control. We can say these things now because the actors promised them at the time. William did not die at 70, nor at 80, nor at 90 but in 1888 at 91 and that longevity of the old King gave Bismarck 26 years in office.

  During those twenty-six years Bismarck forced the King again and again by temper tantrums, hysteria, tears, and threats to do things that every fibre in his spare Royal Prussian frame rejected. For twenty-six years Bismarck ruled by the magic that he exerted over the old man. Bismarck’s career rested on personal relations—in particular, those with the King and the Minister of War—but also with other diplomats, sovereigns, and courtiers. William I, King of Prussia and later Emperor of Germany, ruled in part by the rules of written constitutions but in true Prussian tradition also by the Grace of God, a Protestant, Prussian God. Bismarck needed no majorities in parliament; he needed no political parties. He had a public of one. When that public changed, during the ninety-nine days that the dying Frederick III spent on the throne, and when the dynamic and unstable William II succeeded his father, Bismarck’s days were numbered. William II dismissed him on 20 March 1890. As a Punch cartoon of the time put it, ‘the dropping of the pilot’.

  But the person and the power existed in a real world. As Bismarck said, a statesman does not create the stream of time, he floats on it and tries to steer. Bismarck operated within the limits of the politically realistic and he frequently defined politics as ‘the art of the possible’. The reader needs to know that context, those states and their relations, their government and leaders, the economic and social changes, which turned Europe into the first ‘modern’ society during Bismarck’s lifetime. Bismarck’s genius led him to see possibilities in the configuration of domestic and international forces of the 1860s which allowed him to unify—or more accurately divide—Germany by excluding the Austrian lands. He took bold steps, which stupefied his contemporaries, but he lived long enough to fall victim to that maxim of Edmund Burke about unforeseen consequences:

  that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.21

  Bismarck sprang the idea of universal suffrage on a startled German public in 1863 in order to prevent King William from going to a congress of princes called by the Emperor of Austria. It worked. The Austrian move failed. Prussia unified Germany and universal manhood suffrage became the franchise for the new Reichstag, the lower house of parliament in the new German Empire. Between 1870 and his fall from power, Bismarck lived out the truth in Burke’s maxim. By 1890 ‘very pleasing commencements’ had become in Bismarck’s eyes ‘lamentable conclusions’. Germany had industrialized and a new sullen, hostile working class had appeared. The Catholic population had survived persecution and their votes always produced a large parliamentary party. Votes for everybody had by Burkean irony given parliamentary seats to Socialists and Catholics. By 1890 Bismarck’s brilliant ploy of 1863 had begun to produce majorities made up of what he called ‘enemies of the Reich’. By 1912, Catholics and Socialists, Bismarck’s ‘enemies’, together had an absolute majority of seats in the Reichstag. Universal suffrage, which he had designed to scupper an Austrian initiative in 1863 and to undermine the legitimacy of the lesser German princely states, had yielded the ‘lamentable conclusion’ of legislative stalemate. As the late Enoch Powell once observed, ‘all political careers end in failure’.

  The life of Bismarck still matters today, for it expresses a more general problem than just those described above. Bismarck shows us the strengths and weaknesses of the human self when it exercises power. It shows how powerful the large self can be but it also shows how the exercise of supreme political power never leaves its holders unchanged. Since Bismarck was one of the greatest political figures of all times, he has had many biographers of various types. This biography takes its place in a long and distinguished train: Erick Eyck, A. J. P. Taylor, Werner Richter, Edgar Feuchtwanger, Edward Crankshaw, Otto Pflanze, Lothar Gall, Ernst Engelberg, and Katherine Lerman. Then there are h
uge volumes of J. C. G. Röhl about Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany after Bismarck, the brilliant study of Bismarck’s Catholic adversary, Windthorst, by Margaret Lavinia Anderson, and dozens of other more specialized works. The Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania lists 201 books with ‘Bismarck’ in the title. How does this book differ from its predecessors? It does so in two ways: in its aim and in its method. The aim is easy to express and probably impossible to do: to explain to author and reader how Bismarck exercised his personal power. The method is to let those on whom the power was exercised, friend and foe, German and foreign, young and old, anybody who experienced the power of Bismarck’s personality close up and recorded the impact, tell the story. I have changed the conventional balance between comment and evidence in favour of the latter. I want to recall the long silenced voices of the many, many distinguished people who met Bismarck and wrote down what they saw. As Bismarck’s college friend, the American John Lothrop Motley, explained to Lady William Russell about historical research:

  I go to my archives every day and take a header into the seventeenth century … It is rather diverting … to take the dry bones out of the charnel house and to try to breathe into them a fictitious life. Like Bertram in the third act of Robert the Devil, I like to set the sheeted dead gamboling and pirouetting and making fools of themselves once more.22

  My ‘sheeted dead’ do not make fools of themselves. They taught me who Bismarck was and also who they were. Often they confirmed my view of another of Bismarck’s contemporaries by expressing an opinion to which I had come on my own.

  One example of many will explain the point. General Albrecht von Roon put Bismarck into office and knew it. His reactionary and rigid views could not be further from mine, but he had an odd purity and integrity which moved me. I discovered to my amazement the confirmation of that in an unexpected place. Hildegard von Spitzemberg recorded in her diary on 7 August 1892 that she had been reading Roon’s Denkwürdigkeiten (his memoirs), just published:

  What a pious, decent, competent man, how loyal and yet how frank. One reads how much annoyance he had to swallow from high and highest persons. And how charming his travel descriptions, how touching his relationship to his wife, and his friends Perthes and Blanckenburg.23

  That two people from different worlds and times, an obscure academic in the twenty-first century and a grand society lady of the nineteenth century, saw the same character traits, encouraged the hope that my ‘feel’ for Bismarck’s personality and that of his contemporaries had a foundation.

  Diaries gave me other unique pleasures. I got a glimpse into the toilet arrangements in the 1870s, when Christoph Tiedemann dined for the first time at the Bismarcks in 1875:

  25 January. An interesting day! From 5 to 11 pm in the Bismarck house … The Prince complained about poor appetite. Hats off! I would like to see him once with a good appetite. He took second helpings from every course and complained about ill-treatment when the Princess protested energetically against the enjoyment of a boar’s head in aspic. He sipped the wine but drank lots of beer from a large silver tankard …

  About 7.30 the Prince invited Sybel and me to follow him to his study. As a precaution he offered us his bedroom, which was next to the study, as a place to relieve ourselves. We went in and found under the bed the two objects we sought which were of colossal dimensions. As we stationed ourselves at the wall, Sybel spoke seriously and from the depth of his heart, ‘Everything about the man is great, even his s—!!24

  But the main witness is Otto von Bismarck himself. Bismarck wrote uninterruptedly for sixty years. The official collected works run to nineteen volumes, quarto sized, with an average of more than 500 pages each.25 Volume VIc alone runs to 438 pages just to include the reports sent to the Kaiser, dictation notes, and other official writings from 1871 to 1890. Bismarck wrote thousands of letters to family, friends, and others. He controlled both domestic and foreign policy for twenty-eight years so his correspondence and official writing covered everything from the threat of war with Russia to the state monopoly on tobacco. He seems to have made it his business to know everything about everything. The result was a constant, furious absorption of material and equally stupendous bouts of writing or dictation. Christoph Tiedemann, who served as Bismarck’s first personal assistant from 1875 to 1880, recorded in his diary a typical work session with Bismarck at Varzin, one of his country houses:

  Yesterday I spent 2½ hours in his study, today he dictated the whole afternoon a letter to the Emperor—in all 32 folio sides, not interrupted but written right through. He gave not only an exact account of the negotiations with Bennigsen about his joining the cabinet but at the same time a highly political account of the development of our entire party system since the introduction of a constitution. The Prince dictated without stopping for five hours, I repeat five hours. He spoke more quickly than usual and I could hardly keep up with the flow of thought. The room was overheated, and I began to sweat terribly and thought I might get a cramp. I decided quickly and without saying a word to take off my jacket and throw it over a chair. I continued in shirt sleeves. The Prince, pacing up and down, looked at me at first in amazement but then nodded at me with understanding and continued without pause to dictate.26

  As Bismarck aged and the strains of such a workload weighed more heavily, he became irritable in a way that alarmed his closest collaborators. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen became a member of Bismarck’s inner circle in 1870 and after 1879 was a cabinet minister in the Prussian State Ministry. He saw Bismarck frequently and recorded the deterioration. As early as 1875 he wrote increasingly anxious entries in his diary. Here are two:

  22 February: It is a remarkable feature of Bismarck’s character, how intensively he nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered. In his morbid irritability he feels as a wrong what from the other person was never intended to be that … It was a highly comfortable evening. He ate, cutting the slices with his own knife, half a turkey, and drank to wash it down a quarter or half a bottle of cognac mixed with two to three bottles of Apollinaris. By day, he said, he cannot enjoy anything, neither beer nor champagne, on the other hand cognac and water agree with him best. He forced me to drink with him so that I did not see how much he consumed.27

  4 March: the domestic situation changes kaleidoscopically quickly … Bismarck handles all questions from his own personal point of view, is clearly not about to give up much of his personal influence and changes his mind from day to day. When he himself does not want to do something, he barricades himself behind the Kaiser’s will, when everybody knows that he gets his way on anything if he really wants it.28

  Imagine trying to govern under such a man who tolerates no dissent, who sees disagreement as disloyalty and who never forgets an injury. As Friedrich von Holstein who had worshipped Bismarck as a young diplomat, wrote later in his disillusion:

  It was a psychological necessity for Bismarck to make his power felt by tormenting, harrying and ill-treating people. His pessimistic view of life which had long since blighted every human pleasure, left him with only one source of amusement, and future historians will be forced to recognize that the Bismarck regime was a constant orgy of scorn and abuse of mankind, collectively and individually. This tendency is also the source of Prince Bismarck’s greatest blunders. Here his instinct was the slave of his temperament and justified outbursts for which there was no genuine cause.29

  This ‘future historian’ can agree only in part. The solitary bachelor and senior civil servant Holstein wrote after 1906, embittered by the way he had been forced from office in the foreign policy establishment. He wrote in deep despair about Germany and its situation. He had known Bismarck intimately from 1861 and had once adored him. But this ‘future historian’ must also admit how much Bismarck had coarsened and that what Holstein saw others recognized. But in foreign affairs, he never—I think—behaved as he often did in domestic affairs—angrily and irrationally. In foreign af
fairs he became the prisoner of forces he could not control but took entirely rational action to deal with them as carefully as he could right to the end. The hand never lost its skill. In domestic affairs too, Bismarck showed wisdom and far-sightedness in his introduction of a modern system of accident, invalidity, and old age insurance but allowed his fear and hatred of socialism to blind him on other social questions. Neither author nor reader should judge prematurely the justice of Holstein’s indictment but accept, as we begin to follow the story of his life, that we have to do with one of the most interesting, gifted, and contradictory human beings who ever lived.

  2

  Bismarck: Born Prussian and What That Meant

  Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815, the fourth son of the landowner Ferdinand von Bismarck and his wife, Wilhelmine Mencken, on the family estate in Schönhausen in the Mark of Brandenburg to the east of Berlin. Before we consider the personal inheritance of Otto von Bismarck, we have to look at the historical inheritance and note the exact historical moment when he was born, the place of his birth, the meaning of ‘landowner’ in Prussia, which his father was and he became, the social and political milieu into which the child was born, and finally the ideas and values which those who stood by his cradle had in their heads. Ernst Engelberg called Bismarck an Urpreusse, a basic or essential Prussian, and used the word as part of the title of his two-volume biography.1 But what did it mean to be ‘Prussian’ and especially at that moment? For Bismarck was born at the end of one period—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars—and the beginning of a new one—the ‘long nineteenth century’, which saw the growth of democracy, the modern state, and the emergence of capitalist industry.