Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  On 20 March 1815, twelve days before the baby Bismarck took his first breath, Napoleon had escaped from exile on the island of Elba and returned to Paris. Everywhere he went, the Napoleonic Empire, which the victorious Allies had abolished the previous year, rose from the dead as if by magic. The Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 put an end to the dream of Imperial resurrection but not to the lasting impact that Napoleon had on Europe and on Bismarck’s Prussia. Napoleon had spread and imposed the laws and administration of the French Revolution. That was the first part of Bismarck’s historical inheritance.

  How did the Markgravate of Brandenburg, in which Schönhausen, the Bismark estate, lay, turn into the Kingdom of Prussia and then the core of the German Empire? It was not because it had rich natural resources. Christopher Clark in his splendid history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, describes the landscape of Bismarck’s childhood:

  It possesses no distinctive landmarks. The rivers that cross it are sluggish meandering streams that lack the grandeur of the Rhine or the Danube. Monotonous forests of birch and fir covered much of its surface … ‘Sand’, flatness, ‘bogs’ and ‘uncultivated areas’ were recurring topoi in all early accounts, even the most panegyric. The soil across much of Brandenburg was of poor quality. In some areas the ground was so sandy and light that trees would not grow on it.2

  That this unpromising small principality became the core of the most powerful European kingdom had everything to do with the rulers who governed it between 1640 and 1918. The most remarkable thing about them was their longevity. In an age when precarious succession and sudden death might destabilize the early modern state, the Hohenzollerns lived on and on. Frederick, ‘the Great Elector’, ruled from 1640 to 1688, Frederick the Great from 1740 to 1786, Frederick William III from 1797 to 1840, and Bismarck’s liege lord, William I, King of Prussia and German Emperor, from 1861 to 1888, dying at age of 91. The average Hohenzollern reigned for thirty-three years. Not only were they long-lived but they threw up two of the ablest rulers in the centuries before the French Revolution: the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, the latter, perhaps, the ablest man ever to govern a modern state.

  When the Great Elector died in 1688, he left a prosperous state and a standing army of over 30,000 men. During the reign of Frederick the Great’s father, King Frederick William I (1715–40), the so-called ‘Soldier king’, Prussia had an 80,000-man standing army. Frederick William I was a strict Calvinist who literally would beat those pastors who did not preach properly, but it was Frederick II the Great (1740–86) who transformed his father’s realm both in military and civil affairs. Frederick was the genius king—a victorious general, an enlightened despot, a philosopher, and a musician. His legacy loomed over subsequent Prussian history and it is his Prussia which Bismarck inherited.

  Frederick was clear that only aristocrats could be proper commanders. Thus the Prussian landowning class, into which Bismarck was born, was a service nobility. It had a monopoly of high office in the army and state. As Frederick the Great put it in his Political Testament of 1752:

  [The Prussian nobility] has sacrificed its life and goods for the service of the state; its loyalty and merit have earned it the protection of all its rulers, and it is one of the duties [of the ruler] to aid those noble families which have become impoverished in order to keep them in possession of their lands; for they are to be regarded as the pedestals and the pillars of the state. In such a state no factions or rebellions need be feared … it is one goal of the policy of this state to preserve the nobility.3

  He owed his nobility something, and he knew it. The von Kleist family alone lost thirty members in just one of Frederick’s wars, the Seven Years War, 1756 to 1763, and they were not unique in their sacrifice.4

  The King was famously ‘Enlightened’. He was a full-time intellectual, author of theoretical texts and remarkable letters, all written, of course, in French. German was for servants. He corresponded with great luminaries of the Enlightenment. His indifference to religion was an essential tenet of the Enlightenment. Two years before his death Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, wrote a famous essay (1784) ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and concluded by saying

  the obstacles to universal enlightenment, to man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity, are gradually becoming fewer. In this respect our age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick.

  Frederick the Great left a legacy which not even Bismarck could alter. He set an example of the dutiful ruler, the hard-working and all-competent sovereign. One of his servants—and all ministers and officials were just that—Friedrich Anton von Heinitz wrote an entry in his diary for 2 June 1782:

  You have as your example the King. Who can match him? He is industrious, places obligation before recreation, sees first to business … There is no other monarch like him, none so abstemious, so consistent, none who is so adept at dividing his time.5

  Von Heinitz was right. There was no monarch like Frederick and there never has been one since. A genius as king must be an unlikely outcome of the genetic lottery. In practice Frederick the Great left a set of legacies which Bismarck inherited and helped to preserve: first that the king must work as first servant of the state. William I took that injunction seriously. William I may not have been Frederick the Great but he had inherited the conviction that the monarch must do his homework in order to ‘govern’ properly.

  As a second legacy Frederick bequeathed a special identity to the ‘Junker class’ as the Prussian nobility was called. This sense of service to the Crown among the Prussian aristocracy defined them and their idea of who they were. They served in the army; they served in the diplomatic corps, administered provinces, ran ministries, and had a right to all of that, but the army came first and by a long way. There is a wonderful moment when Botho von Rienäcker, the hero of Theodor Fontane’s delightful novel Irrungen Wirrungen set in the early 1870s about love between a young Junker lieutenant and the daughter of a Berlin flower seller, has to confront his fierce uncle who has come to Berlin to sort the young lad out. Here is a passage in my translation:

  In front of the Redern Palace he saw Lieutenant von Wedell of the Dragoon Guards coming towards him.

  ‘Where to, Wedell?

  ‘To the Club. And you?’

  ‘To Hiller.’

  ‘A little early.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s the use? I have to lunch with an old uncle of mine … Besides he, that is my uncle, served in your regiment, admittedly a long time ago, early 40s. Baron Osten.’

  ‘The one from Wietzendorf?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘O, I know him, that is, the name. A bit related. My grandmother was an Osten. Is he the one who has declared war on Bismarck?’

  ‘That’s the one. You know what, Wedell? You should come too. The Club won’t run away and Pitt and Serge will be there too. You will find them whether you show up at 1 or at 3. The old boy still loves the Dragoon blue and gold and is a good enough old Prussian to be delighted with every Wedell.’

  ‘Good, Rienäcker, but it’s your responsibility.’

  ‘My pleasure!’

  In such conversation they had reached Hiller, where the old baron stood at the glass door and looked out, for it was one minute after one. He overlooked the lateness and was visibly delighted, as Botho presented Lieutenant von Wedell,

  ‘Sir, your nephew …’

  ‘No need to apologize. Herr von Wedell, everything that calls itself Wedell is extremely welcome, and if it wears that tunic, double and thrice welcome. Come, gentlemen, we want to retreat from this deployment of tables and chairs and regroup to the rear—not that retreat is a Prussian thing but here advisable.’6

  This superb vignette tells you what you need to know about this class. First, they all know each other and often turn out to be related. They identify with their regiments the way an Englishman does with his public school or Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The two young Junker lieutenants speak in clipped sentences and have accents which
‘cut’ or in the German sound schneidig. If they have to ask about somebody, the first question would be ‘wo hat er gedient?’ Where did he serve? ‘Serve’ means only one thing: the regiment.

  The old Baron detests lateness and would have scolded Botho had the young man not brought a Wedell from the Dragoon Guards as a diversionary tactic. The old man embodies the virtues of the old Prussian nobility: devotion to duty, efficiency, punctuality, self-sacrifice, often based on an authentic Lutheran or Evangelical Protestant piety, and a fierce, implacable pride. Women played no role in this Junker set of values. Bismarck described that in a conversation with Hildegard vom Spitzemberg after his retirement:

  The first Foot Guards Regiment is a military monastery. Esprit de corps to the point of madness. One should forbid these gentlemen to marry; I urge anybody who plans to marry someone from this regiment to give the idea up. She will be married to the service, made miserable by the service and driven to death through the service … 7

  One of Bismarck’s closest and oldest friends, John Lothrop Motley, the Boston aristocrat who got to know Bismarck when they were both students at Göttingen, wrote to his parents in 1833:

  one can very properly divide the Germans into two classes: the Vons and the non Vons. Those lucky enough to have the three magic letters in front of their names belong to the nobility and as consequences are highly aristocratic. Without these the others can arrange all the letters of the alphabet in every possible combination, they remain plebs.8

  South and West German ‘vons’ existed too but few of them had ‘served’ Frederick the Great. They belonged to the richer, more relaxed, less dour, often Catholic, aristocracy. Many of them held grand Imperial titles such as the title Freiherr (free lord), and Freiherren only recognized the Holy Roman Emperor as sovereign. They obeyed no territorial princes in whose territories their estates happen to be located. The Austrian nobility and Hungarian magnates, some of whose estates spread over areas the size of Luxembourg or the US state of Delaware, looked at the Junker class with a mixture of admiration and revulsion. The Austrian ambassador to Berlin in the early years of Bismarck’s tenure as Prussian Minister President, Count Alajos Károlyi von Nagykároly, belonged to the grand Magyar aristocracy, way above the social standing of a von Rienäcker, a von Kleist, or a von Bismarck-Schönhausen. In January 1864 he wrote to the Austrian Foreign Minister, Johann Bernhard Graf von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen, an equally great nobleman, about the crisis between crown and parliament in Prussia. He argued shrewdly that the conflict was

  the surest sign not only of the political but of the social divisiveness which is inherent in the internal life of the Prussian state, to wit, the passionate hatred of different estates and classes for each other. This antagonism … which places in sharp opposition the army and the nobility on one hand and all the other industrious citizens on the other is one of the most significant and darkest characteristics of the Prussian Monarchy.9

  Bismarck’s greatest achievement was to preserve those ‘darkest characteristics’ of the Junker class through three wars, the unification of Germany, the emergence of democracy, capitalism, industrialization, and the development of the telegraph, the railroad and, by the end of his career, the telephone. Botho’s and Wedell’s grandsons still commanded regiments under Adolf Hitler. They supported the Nazi’s war and led the army until that war was lost and it was they—a von Moltke, a von Yorck, a von Witzleben, and others of their class—who formed the core of the 1944 plot on Hitler’s life. It took the Second World War, the deaths of tens of millions of innocent human beings, and the Russian occupation of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Ducal Prussia, and the other ‘core’ territories to destroy their estates and expel the owners. On 25 February 1947 the Allied occupation authorities signed a law which abolished the state of Prussia itself, the only state in world history to be abolished by decree:

  The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has ceased to exist.10

  This act drove the wooden cross through the heart of Frederick the Great.

  Bismarck belonged to the Junker class. Nobody doubted that, and the reader will see that his Junker identity located him and many of his values and acts. He boasted of his long Junker lineage, but he never entirely conformed to the type, never quite behaved as a proper Junker. The lunch at Hillers in Fontane’s novel that I cited above had begun well. It turned into a disaster when Bismarck became the subject of discussion:

  the old Baron, who in any case had high blood pressure, went red across his bald pate and the remaining curly fringe of hair on his temples seemed to want to coil itself tighter.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Botho. What does that “certainly, one can say that” mean? It means more or less “one can also not say that”. I know where that all will end. It will suggest that a certain cuirassier office in the reserves, who has held nothing in reserve, especially when it comes to revolutionary measures; it will suggest, I tell you, that a certain man from the Halberstadt regiment with the sulfur yellow collar stormed St Privat absolutely on his own and encircled Sedan on his own. Botho, you cannot come to me with that stuff. He was a civil service trainee in the Potsdam government under old Meding who incidentally never had a good word for him, I know that, and all he learned was how to write dispatches. That much I will give him; he knows how to write dispatches, or in other words he is a pen-pusher. But it was not the pen-pushers who made Prussia great. Was the victor of Fehrbellin a pen-pusher? Was the victor at Leuthen a pen-pusher? Was Blücher a pen-pusher? Or Yorck? Here is the Prussian pen. I cannot bear this cult.’11

  For old Baron Osten, the army had unified Germany not Bismarck. The army had made Prussia and Kurt Anton, Baron von Osten, embodied that army and that state as a Junker landlord and retired officer as did the young lieutenants turning pale before his rage. Prussian Junkers took every occasion to wear uniform and Bismarck insisted on one, even though he had only served briefly and most unwillingly as a reservist. His friend and patron, Minister of War Albrecht von Roon, found Bismarck’s insistence on wearing uniform a little awkward. In May of 1862 when Bismarck had arrived in Berlin in the hope that he would soon be made Minister-President, Roon recorded in his diary that at the end of May on Tempelhof field the annual Guards Parade took place, and Bismarck attended:

  His tall figure wore then the well known cuirassier’s uniform with the yellow collar but only with the rank of major on it. Everybody knew how much trouble getting that had cost him. Repeatedly he tried to make clear that at least the major’s epaulettes were essential at the court in St Petersburg to give the Prussian Ambassador necessary standing and for his personal prestige. The then Chief of the Military Cabinet (General von Manteuffel) could not be moved for a very long time to make the necessary recommendation.12

  The prestige of the army rested on Frederick the Great’s victories. It took a total defeat of Frederick the Great’s army in 1806 to allow a team of ‘defence intellectuals’ loose on the Junkers’ prized possession, the Prussian army. They introduced a War Academy with a higher level to train the future elite and to work on the new technology in artillery and engineering. Top graduates of the War Academy would enter a new agency called the General Staff, and there would be for the first time a modern Ministry of War. As Arden Bucholz in his study of Moltke put it, the Prussian Army became ‘a learning organization … The Prussian General Staff and Army became pioneers in discipline-based, institutionalized knowledge.’13 Prussian reform depended on a small group of ‘enlightened’ army officers, senior civil servants and Berlin intelligentsia. They believed—understandably—that French revolutionary ideas could not be stopped, indeed, should not be. Yet they could not escape the paradox that to reform Prussia meant to make it into something not Prussian. Even distinguished military reformers like Yorck hated what they saw around them. When Napoleon forced Freiherr vom Stein, the most important of the reformers from office in November 1808, Yorck wrote, ‘One mad head is already smashed
; the remaining nest of vipers will dissolve in its own poison.’14

  Help for Prussia’s embattled Junkers came from an unlikely source, Edmund Burke. Burke became immortal not because of his politics, oratory, or other writings but because, when the French Revolution broke out, he wrote an instantly great book. Reflections on the Revolution in France And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, November 1790. This large unruly masterpiece invented modern conservatism. Burke had a dim view of human nature. Nothing changes. Human vice and folly merely assume new guises. Burke took an equally dim view of human foresight. Plans always go wrong because they ignore the law of unintended consequences.

  Burke’s legacy was a new Conservatism to match a new radicalism in France.

  This new conservatism flourished on the continent of Europe and only very partially and temporarily in the years 1800 to 1820 in England. Burke delivered arguments against any liberalization of reactionary regimes: the people are stupid, men are inherently unequal, planning for improvement is hopeless, stability is better than change. The opponents of France turned Burke’s Reflections into arguments for rule from above by the aristocracy and, of course, against reforming enlightened despots. They wanted no more of Frederick the Great with his atheism or his rationality than of the French Revolutionaries, since reason itself was bad.

  They attacked liberal capitalism, Adam Smith, and the free market and used Burke’s arguments in a very different context. Burke had glorified the great English landowners, because land was stable and the ‘moneyed interest’ was unstable and unrestrained. Money flowed in everywhere. The land became a mere commodity, an object of trade and not the basis of a stable society. Burke explained it in this vivid passage.

  By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation, that species of property becomes (as it were) volatilized; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous activity, and thereby throws into the hands of the several managers, principal and subordinate, Parisian and provincial, all the representative of money.15