Neither Roon nor his wife Anna had any capital and even in the early 1850s lived the life of a simple regimental Commander. As his son wrote, ‘they were basically living on his salary.’53 In the summer of 1834 Lieutenant von Roon was hard at work in the fields and forests of Pomerania, surveying and sketching the landscape for the topography. He invited his nephew Moritz von Blanckenburg to help him and to bring a friend. Moritz brought his best friend, the 19-year-old Otto von Bismarck. The two lads accompanied von Roon on his project in the morning and went hunting in the afternoons.54 The young Bismarck, who so dazzled his contemporary Motley, must have made an impression on the officer twelve years his senior, who was later to make Bismarck minister-president of Prussia. The link—as so often in Junker Prussia—tied them through the familial net and also through ‘service’ in the army.
For reasons not entirely clear (Marcks suggests that, since Bismarck fell ill in his last semester at Göttingen, it seemed prudent to study nearer home),55 Bismarck moved to Berlin where he spent the winter of 1833–4 and at some point changed his matriculation from Göttingen to the University of Berlin. Motley joined him there and a third friend, Alexander von Keyserling, completed the trio. Engelberg calls Motley and Keyserling Bismarck’s ‘good spirits’.56 Lothar Gall puts it more strongly—‘The American was one of the few real friends that Bismarck had in his life’—and suggests further that Motley introduced Bismarck to Byron, to Goethe, to Shakespeare, and the full flower of German romantic art.57 Not much of it took. Pflanze points out that Bismarck never showed much interest in the cultural awakening that made Germany between 1770 and 1830 the intellectual capital of the world. He notes that Bismarck was essentially unaffected by his classical education, by German idealism, by the new historicism, by romanticism, by the great era of German musical composition.58 Hegel left him cold, ditto Schopenhauer. He had nothing to do with either left or right Hegelians, seems not to have cared much for Schelling, Fichte, or most of the romantic poets. But there was one major exception: Friedrich Schiller mattered to Bismarck and even more to the soldiers: to Roon, to Manteuffel, to Wrangel, but interestingly not to the cool Moltke.
Bismarck certainly knew his Schiller well but he preferred the lyric poets with a sense of humour. Baroness Spitzemberg recorded the following conversation in December of 1884, as she sat with Bismarck in his ‘corner’:
After dinner he smoked and leafed through a volume of Chamisso’s poems, which together with Uhland, Heine, Rückert he treats himself to so that he can have copies in every one of his residences. ‘When I am really irritated and exhausted, I prefer to read the German lyricists, they cheer me up’.59
In May 1835 Bismarck sat successfully the first stage of the legal examinations to enter the Ministry of Justice. As he wrote to Scharlach in July of that year:
I have just returned from several weeks of leave in the countryside and have hurled myself back into the duty of bringing to light and punishing the crimes of the Berliners. This high duty to the state, which in my case consists of the mechanical function of taking the minutes, began promisingly but only tolerably while it was new. Now that my beautiful fingers begin to curve under the burden of the constantly moving pen, I wish most ardently to serve the commonweal in some other capacity.60
In the spring of 1836 he took time off to prepare for the second examination and this time went to Schönhausen, which he describes in his usual mocking tones:
For the last four weeks I sit here in this old, cursed manor house with its pointed arches and four metre-thick walls, some 30 rooms in which two have as furnishing splendid damask tapestries, the colour of which can just about be seen on the shreds of cloth that remain, masses of rats, fireplaces in which the wind howls, in the ‘old castle of my fathers’, where everything which is suitable conspires to maintain a real spleen. Next to it is a splendid old church. My room looks out on the churchyard, and on the other side onto one of those old gardens with trimmed hedges of yew and fine old lindens. The only living soul in these crumbling surroundings is your friend, fed by and cared for by a dried-out old house maid who was a childhood playmate of my 65-year-old father. I prepare my exams, listen to the nightingales, target shoot and read Voltaire and Spinoza’s ethics, which I found bound in beautiful pigskin in the library here.61
The complexity of this piece of prose needs a word. Bismarck elevates Schönhausen to the ‘old castle of my fathers’. In fact, pictures show that the house has an absolutely typical medieval wing with steeply slanting roof and small windows. Next to it a grander late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century range, three stories high with two plain pilasters running from ground up to the roof, again a modest tiled roof, no pediment and a pleasant curved, baroque arch over the door. Dozens of rural estates would have looked that way and obscure squires, who had enjoyed a good harvest, would add very similar ‘noble’ wings. The ‘castle’ has become a ruin in Bismarck’s heavy romantic irony, a sentimental and faintly absurd haunt of aristocratic decay, and there alone sits the Byronic young man attended by a hag. The self-dramatization, the pleasure in the word painting, the exaltation of his aristocratic inheritance, and the exuberance of the writing create a powerful impact. It lacks the earlier earthy fun of the ‘fat Junker’ letter but it suggests that Bismarck has arrived at a new stage in self-dramatization. After all, the place is not a joke but his claim to status in a hierarchical, aristocratic society. He bore the name of the place. He was a Bismarck-Schönhausen, as opposed to the other branches of the Bismarck family with different estate names. Hence its elevation to something from Scott’s Ivanhoe. This word mastery marks his long career. He became the Bismarck we know because he had a powerful personality and because he could write with such artistry.
In the meantime, he had got fed up with working for the city courts and decided that law would never do, so he applied to be allowed to take the second examination not for the legal profession but for the diplomatic service. Here he needed the permission of the Foreign Minister, who happened to be Jean Pierre Frédéric Ancillon, former tutor to the young Crown Prince Frederick William IV. Through that happy pedagogic employment Ancillon rose to be Foreign Secretary of the Kingdom. Ancillon was a highly cultivated academic and a relative of Friedrich Gentz on his mother’s side. What Motley wrote about Vienna in the 1860s applied even more so to the much smaller Prussian society: ‘They are all related to each other, ten deep. It is one great family party of 3 or 300.’62 Ancillon had no very high opinion of the Junker class in general and the young Bismarck in particular and suggested that he should look to something more homespun: the customs service or duty in another domestic capacity. Bismarck got his older brother to pull strings and thus gained the sponsorship of Count Arnim-Boitzenburg, the district president of administration in Aachen in the Prussian Rhineland.63 But even that connection got him nowhere. In the end Bismarck had to settle for the domestic civil service, which involved facing the second legal examination but this time not in boring Berlin but in Aachen where his patron controlled the local administration.
Aachen, known usually in English as Aix-la-Chapelle, had much to recommend it. The westernmost city in Germany and the ancient capital of Charlemagne’s empire, it had many fine monuments and romantic ruins. It also had a flourishing spa. Aachen advertises itself today as ‘the city with the hottest springs north of the Alps’, with temperatures between 45°C and 75°C. These springs were the reason Charlemagne chose Aachen as the political centre of his empire. ‘Darumb er dann zu Aach sich geren nidergelassen, und von dess warmen Bad daselbst wegen Wohnung gehabt.’ (Thereupon he settled in Aach and from the warmth the same had dwelling.)64 The spa, the history and the location made it an ideal tourist attraction and certainly attracted the young Bismarck, a handsome 22-year-old, six foot four, slender, a fine linguist who spoke really good English and was utterly, utterly charming. Bismarck took the exams to be admitted to the administrative service, which he passed with distinction, swearing the oath of the civil servant in Ju
ly 1836.65
The year and a bit in Aachen proved emotionally turbulent and very expensive.
Bismarck neglected his work, was frequently absent, and twice (at least) in love. In June of 1836 he wrote to Bernhard and described a trip on the way to Aachen with
a very strong English party … The trip gave me great pleasure but cost me a lot of money … If one does not weaken at home and let me have a small gratification, I do not see how this can sensibly work out. Then to live here without cash is simply impossible.66
Engelberg, who published his two-volume biography in the German Democratic Republic five years later than Gall, makes use of ten Bismarck letters between 30 June 1836 and 19 July 1837 that were omitted from the Complete Works. The letters show the hero of German unification in a less than flattering light. There was, first of all, Bismarck’s ruthless exploitation of his patron, Adolf Heinrich Count von Arnim-Boitzenburg. Arnim-Boitzenburg was born on 10 April 1803 in Berlin and had enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Prussian administrative bureaucracy. At the age of 30 he had already reached the high position of Regierungspräsident (provincial governor), a post which normally marked the pinnacle of a Prussian administrator’s career, and was only 33 when he took over at Aachen. He later went on to hold cabinet office and was briefly prime minister during the turbulent years of the Revolution of 1848.67 As we shall see, by 1864, he had begun to feel ‘reservations’ about his client’s policies. In 1836, Count Arnim-Boitzenburg could not have been more accommodating. He gave Bismarck special treatment and allowed him to move from section to section ‘on account of my following the diplomatic career path unlike the other trainees’,68 a ‘career path’ which Foreign Minister Ancillon had categorically not permitted.
Bismarck used the time to fall in love. By 10 August he was writing to his brother that he was utterly overwhelmed: ‘to describe how much in love would leave the wildest oriental hyperbole an inadequate measure’. The Duke and Duchess of Cleveland and their niece Laura Russell
and a long tail of authentic Britons who examined me with their lorgnettes when His Grace of Cleveland bade me for the first time to have a glass of wine with him and with that worthiness and elegance characteristic of me, I poured a half gallon of sherry under my waistcoat.69
On 30 October Bismarck wrote to Bernhard that the Duke and Duchess had departed with Laura, with whom I am ‘as good as promised’ but he let her go without making it official. He started to gamble to recoup the debts incurred by living all summer in high society and had considered suicide, ‘I put aside for this purpose a cord of yellow silk which I have reserved for its rarity just in case.’70 On 2 November he wrote to Bernhard to say that their father had sent him money but with recriminations.71 By 3 December 1836 he had discovered that the beautiful Laura was not the niece of the Duke of Cleveland but a child of a previous indiscretion of her mother’s who had only been the Duchess for two years and was a commoner. He was now convinced that he had been manipulated and that behind the lorgnettes the English were laughing at him. ‘They were saying: “look there that tall monster, that is the silly German baron whom they have caught in the woods, with his pipe and his seal-ring”.’72
I see no sign of Bismarck feeling ‘dissatisfaction with himself and an inner emptiness’ or that Bismarck was ‘in flight and sought distraction’, as Lothar Gall does.73 Instead, I see every sign of a proud, fatuously self-confident, provincial gentleman swept away by the wealth and style of the English aristocracy, so incomparably richer and more confident than the rural squires who made up the Prussian Junker class. English country houses like Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, home of an untitled gentry family, the Wilsons, were bigger, grander, and more impressive than most of the palaces of reigning German princes, and the Wilsons were much, much richer than any equivalent Prussian family. Robert Walpole’s Houghton Hall with its hundreds of rooms, exceeded any royal palace in Germany except for the Habsburgs of Vienna and the Walpoles were merely Norfolk squires who through Sir Robert Walpole had made money in the government service.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography shows how desperately out of his class young Bismarck was. Here is an extract from the entry:
William Harry Vane, first duke of Cleveland (1766–1842), … left almost £1 million in addition to huge estates, around £1,250,000 in consols, and plate and jewels to the value of a further £1 million.74
If we use the exchange rate of 1871 of £1 = 6.72 thaler, then the Duke of Cleveland’s realizable fortune, without valuing the lands, amounted to £3,250,000 or 21,840,000 thaler.75 If the Duke lived frugally on the income of ‘gilts’ (or consols) only at, say, 3 per cent per annum, he would have had an annual income of £37,500 or 252,000 thaler. When Bismarck became Prussian delegate to the Bundesrat in 1851, he had an income of 21,000 thaler.76 The Duke of Cleveland must have had an income at least twenty times that of one of the highest-paid Prussian civil servants in the mid-nineteenth century. A 22-year-old country squire, dazzled at the prospects before him, could not entertain the Duke’s party in a suitable manner without going into inconceivable amounts of debt. No wonder he considered ‘suicide’, in October 1836, after the Duke’s party with Laura had left Aachen.
He recovered and by July of the next year, he could write to his brother to say that he was ‘again on fire’, this time a conflagration lit by Isabella Lorraine-Smith, another beautiful English woman ‘with blonde hair and incredible beauty’.77 It was a repeat of the previous summer with Bismarck hosting champagne dinners, incurring debts, and overstaying his leave. Once again he thought he had become engaged. On 30 August 1837 he wrote from Frankfurt to his friend, Karl Friedrich von Savigny, that he had grounds for that belief:
For the last few days I find myself here with my family (an expression I beg you to consider absolutely confidential). [He asked Savigny to send his dress uniform to Geneva from Aachen.] It would make me very happy if you could be present at my wedding which will probably take place at Scarsdale in Leicestershire. For the moment please tell the Aachen friends that I have gone home to hunt for two months.78
The father of the beautiful Isabella could not compete with the Duke of Cleveland. Mr Lorraine-Smith was Rector of Passenham in Leicestershire, and a well-to-do man with lands in three counties but even before the Frankfurt letter, as he wrote to his brother, Bismarck had begun to get cold feet about the prospect of ‘plunging into the hell-fires of a narrow, bourgeois marriage’. His future father-in-law drew an income from the living of Passenham, which would end with his death.
With my shortage of funds, I do not think I can take a wife who brings less than £1,000 a year, and I am not sure whether L. is willing or even able in the long run to give so much … How do you like these calculations from the pen of somebody who considers himself to be very much in love?79
One can see now why the devout editors of the Gesammelte Werke left these ten letters out. He had behaved despicably from beginning to end. He had abused the generosity of Count von Arnim-Boitzenburg. He had lived absurdly, had fallen in love with Laura Russell but got out of it as soon as he heard of her illegitimate birth, about which even he had signs of remorse:
What must poor Laura think of me, when I fell in love with her as the niece of a Duke and turned my back on her as soon as I heard that she had the misfortune to come into the world in a so-so way?80
He had then repeated the comedy at a lower level with Isabella but shrunk from his engagement either because of his own monetary considerations or because the Revd Lorraine-Smith had seen through him. He had been absent without leave for months on end and done no work. He had been ruled by his pride and had spent a fortune to save face. Even the long-suffering Arnim-Boitzenburg had finally had enough. He declared that with heavy irony the trainee’s conduct was
no longer appropriate … I can only approve your previously mentioned decision to transfer to one of the royal provincial administrations in the old Prussian provinces where you will be able to return to more intensive engagement which
you have desired to find in vain under the social circumstances of life in Aachen.81
Bismarck returned to Potsdam and began work again in the civil administration.
In January 1838 Bismarck wrote to his father that he had been trying to evade military service, another letter which the guardians of the flame omitted from the official publication of Bismarck’s collected works. He told his Father that he had not yet begun his military service because he made ‘one last attempt’ to get out of his one-year military service in the reserves ‘as a result of muscular weakness which I explained came from a sword-cut under the right arm which I feel when I lift it (!); unfortunately the blow was not deep enough.’82 Social life could not compare with Aachen but he had been put on the list of garçons who were invited to balls by Prince Frederick (1794–1863) and by the Crown Prince.
At the end of September 1838 Bismarck wrote to his father from Greifswald, where he had been stationed as an army reservist, that he had begun to study agriculture at the university and in the agricultural college. He included a copy of a letter he wrote to Cousin Caroline von Bismarck-Bohlen, ‘my picture book beautiful cousin with whom—I mention in passing—I am utterly in love’, who begged him to continue his career.83 He copied out the long letter to Caroline for his father and later made a copy for his fiancée Johanna von Puttkammer. Engelberg notes that ‘the very fact that he sent it to several addresses, makes it a key document in his development, but above all its content. It is a masterpiece of family diplomacy.’84 It seems fairly certain that he decided to leave his potentially brilliant career in the civil service because the burden of his huge and still growing debts oppressed him. In July he visited his mother in Berlin who was now terminally ill and poured out his heart. He told her how miserable he was and begged her to help him find some better position, how his life had become unbearable, the work disgusted him, and how the prospect of spending his whole life to end up a Regierungspräsident on 2,000 thaler a year filled his great soul with despair. Wilhelmine in turn wrote to Ferdinand who then decided to make over the three Pomeranian estates to the two sons and to withdraw to Schönhausen. By running one of his father’s estates he would generate income, live at home, reduce his living costs, and avoid the temptations to gamble and spend conspicuously.85 Of course he could tell nobody in the family about what actually happened in Aachen so he raised the decision to leave the civil service onto a higher plane. The letter—four pages long—contains one of the most often quoted paragraphs Bismarck ever composed:
Bismarck: A Life Page 7