Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  He could not come right away because his duty as dyke captain would continue as long as the Elbe threatened to overflow. ‘It is the first time in my life, I think, that I yearn for a hard frost.’130

  On the 12th day of January 1847 Otto Leopold Edward von Bismarck-Schönhausen was officially engaged to Johanna Friederike Charlotte Dorothea Eleonore von Puttkamer. On the same day he dashed off a note to Malwine von Arnim, his sister, which simply said ‘All Right’.131

  The months of the engagement overlap with the beginning of the rumbles of the revolution of 1848 and Bismarck’s debut as a politician. Since Bismarck now had important things to do, he had to write Johanna and write he did. He poured out his heart in dozens of rich, long letters, each with a different and more extravagant form of address in English, French, or Italian—‘Giovanna mia’, ‘dearest’, ‘Jeanne la méchante’, because she had not written, long quotes from English poets, Byron, Moore, etc. ‘en proie à des émotions violentes’. It is in this period that he wrote the long letter about his mother and father, which I quoted earlier. The letters bubble with wit and extravagant romanticism, as in a letter from March 1847 on

  the long standing rule of conservatism in this house, in which my fathers for centuries have lived in the same rooms, were born and died, as the pictures in the house and the church show, from iron clanging knights to the cavaliers of the Thirty Years War with their long locks and twisted beards, then to the wearers of the huge allonge wigs who strutted round the halls in their red heels and the riders with the neat pony-tails who fought in Frederick the Great’s war down to the enfeebled youth who lies at your feet.132

  A month later he described life at his future in-laws in a letter to his sister:

  As far as my person is concerned, I feel pretty well except for a light headache which my mother-in-law maintains in that she pours a strong Rhine wine for me at all hours of the day in the sincere conviction that I was nursed and raised on fermented drinks and that I need a quart or two to get through the day. In general I find myself in a state of comfort that I have not had for years and live for the day with the carefree abandon of a student.133

  On 8 May 1847 Bismarck wrote to his fiancée with important news:

  Dearest, only, beloved, Juanita, my better half [English in the original] I want to begin my letter with every form of endearment I can imagine because I need your forgiveness very much; I will not leave you to guess why, lest you imagine something worse, but simply say that I have been elected to the Landtag … One of our deputies, Brauchitsch, is so ill that he cannot attend the meetings … Now, since among the six deputies the first position was vacant, the Magdeburg estates ought to have moved the second into the first spot and then elect a new sixth, instead quite unusually they elected me to the first position though I am new in the county and was not even an alternate deputy.134

  The new Bismarck had emerged—the politician. From that moment to her death in 1894 Johanna would have to suffer his long absences, his tensions, and preoccupations as Bismarck for the first time found his true calling. By violating the rule of the ballot, the electors of Magdeburg had launched the career of the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century and Johanna von Puttkamer lost her husband’s full attention even before they had formally been married.

  What was Bismarck’s Johanna like as a person? Friedrich von Holstein saw her for the first time when he arrived at the St Petersburg embassy in 1861.

  Frau Bismarck, like her husband, was a peculiar person. The only attraction she could boast was a pair of arresting dark eyes. She had dark hair too, which revealed the Slav origins of the Puttkamer family. She was entirely devoid of feminine charm, attached no importance to dress, and only lived for her family. She exercised her quite considerable musical talent merely for her own enjoyment, though Bismarck liked to listen when she played classical music such as Beethoven. In society her speech and behaviour were not always appropriate but she moved with a calm assurance, which prevented her from ever appearing ill at ease or unsure of herself. Her husband let her go her own way. I never once saw him take her to task.135

  A female observer met Johanna von Bismarck for the first time a few years after Holstein had. Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg (b. 20 January 1843), was 20 and not yet married to Carl von Spitzemberg when she went with her father, the former Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg, Friedrich Karl Gottlob Freiherr Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen (1809–89), on his first official call on the new Prussian Minister-President in June 1863:

  On our return we found an invitation to tea, so we threw on our best clothes and drove to 76 Wilhelmstrasse. Frau von Bismarck, a woman in her early forties, tall with dark hair and beautiful brown eyes, received us in a very friendly way and in her entire manner so plain and confiding that we soon felt ourselves very much at home. Later her husband appeared, a very tall handsome man, with an energetic, almost defiant expression on his face. They seem to have an open house …136

  The next day they called on the Bismarcks again and Hildegard wrote in her diary:

  The whole tone of the house is very plain, natural, and refined and it pleased me very much. After dinner father and Bismarck got involved in political discussions in which they both became very deeply involved …137

  We must pause now to get to know the first of the important Bismarck diarists. Hildegard Spitzemberg—as a Freifrau she is conventionally titled ‘Baroness’—belonged to that rare category of people, the true diarist. Clever, well read, sensitive, and very distinctly not Prussian, she kept a diary every day from her tenth year to her death at 71 in 1914, and it is a wonderful diary, full of human interest and shrewd insights. Her husband, the Württemberg ambassador to Berlin, Carl Freiherr Hugo von Spitzemberg, whom she married on 18 September 1864, took a house on the Wilhelmstrasse next to the Bismarcks. Since Hildegard was beautiful, young, and clever, Bismarck found her a very agreeable conversation partner, and, since she recorded everything she saw and heard, she constitutes one of my most important sources. When in November 1887, the Bismarcks, both Prince and Princess, went to a court function, Hildegard Spitzemberg wrote in her diary: ‘16 November, B’s go to court—a great event. I would like to see the old rag that the dear lady pulls from her clothes closet and happy as can be puts on.’138

  Baroness Spitzemberg found herself regularly at the Bismarcks, and was often taken in to sit at the host’s right. He paid such attention to her that in March 1870 she confided to her diary:

  Count Bismarck is at present more than ever unusually charming to me and seeks me out at every opportunity, is there some object behind it or is it purely personal?139

  The answer was probably both: there was ‘some object behind it’ and it was ‘purely personal’. Bismarck re-enacted with his ‘Hilgachen’ the same forbidden and impossible game of love he had carried on with Marie. The beautiful, clever woman—like his mother—could never be achieved and hence in order to survive and put an end to his loneliness he had chosen a plain and limited one. The pattern would repeat itself in the mid-1860s with Katarina Princess Orlov, again with a frankness in his feeling that must have been hard for Johanna to bear. In 1888 Bismarck spoke to Hildegard unusually frankly about his relationship to his wife and daughter:

  When I observed that the Empress had never had a master over her who would have educated her, the Prince replied ‘broken but educated is harder than one thinks. With a wife you can do it sometimes but with a daughter that is a great work of art. I have clashed with Marie very hard. She has for all her intelligence a remarkably narrow circle of interests: husband, children, they fulfil her but otherwise almost nobody, let alone humanity, interests her. She is essentially lazy, that’s the problem.’ I replied, I wondered that she shared so few of his interests given that she so clearly loves him. ‘That’s the same with my wife. It had its good sides. I live in another atmosphere at home.’ On that subject a lot might have been said about real spiritual partnership between married people or between pa
rents and children, but the way it is, what he said laughing in reply to Lehndorff’s toast contains the pure truth, ‘Yes, she is the best wife that I have had.’140

  The shrewd Baroness saw with the intuition that made her a great diarist the void at the core of Bismarck’s relationship to his wife. There was, as she wrote, the possibility of ‘real spiritual partnership between married people or between parents and children’ but Bismarck never experienced that. He undoubtedly loved Johanna. His letters show that. But she was, as he admitted to Baroness Spitzemberg, no intellectual, political, nor artistic companion, other than in her music. Nor was she ever prepared to play the role of ‘society lady’ which Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg, daughter of a grand seigneur and prime minister of a kingdom, wife of another grand seigneur, played ‘as to the manor born’. In June 1885, Baroness Spitzemberg cleared her desk: ‘As I looked over the invitation cards of the past winter today for the last time before I tore them up, I calculated that from November to the present I had received 41 invitations to dinner and 53 to an evening.’141 The arithmetic shows that there were 94 formal invitations for the 197 days or one every other day for six and a half months, and that excludes less formal occasions without written invitations. A lady in the highest society lived that way. Johanna never did. The Bismarcks after a certain point simply stopped going out. As Holstein saw thirty years earlier, Johanna refused to play the game or to conform. Was that her way to repay Bismarck for marrying her on the rebound?

  When Johanna finally died on 27 November 1894, Hildegard Spitzemberg discovered that she was no longer welcome ‘at Bismarcks’ as she had been for thirty years. It suddenly became clear that Johanna had wanted her there to play the role that she had filled: to give Bismarck that safe dose of feminine beauty and intelligence that Bismarck needed and Johanna could never supply. On 1 April 1895, Bismarck’s 80th birthday, when she was for the first time not invited to the party, Baroness Spitzemberg finally accepted that she had lost her entrée to the Bismarcks with the death of Johanna:

  Since the death of the Princess, I lack the personality through whom I can make my wishes and rights count. Marie is entirely alienated, the sons, even when the Bismarcks were still here, stood apart from me. If I were a man, I could settle somewhere in Friedrichsruh and enjoy everything that happens from A to Z.142

  The loss of proximity to the great man meant a lot to her on a personal and intellectual level for he had given her that contact with the centre of power that filled the years with interest and the diary pages with content. There was also a social consideration. Bismarck represented the apex of power in Imperial Germany and his favour had raised the prestige of the Spitzembergs in a society still organized entirely by aristocratic rankings. When Johanna died, the contact ceased. The old Bismarck never asked for her, and she never saw him again.

  In the spring of 1847, the electors of Magdeburg chose a 32-year-old country squire with a reputation for wild behaviour and irresponsible views. Yet he had something which nobody of his social set and generation could offer—an astonishingly powerful personality and a magnetism which must have attracted them. This self and the gigantic frame in which it rested was his only claim on them. He had no experience, no credentials, and no obvious qualifications, but he was Bismarck. That turned out to be enough.

  4

  Bismarck Represents Himself, 1847–1851

  Bismarck entered politics through his position as a landlord and did so in company with his neighbours. On 19 December 1846 the Prussian Minister of Justice issued an order that reform proposals for the traditional patrimonial justice—the right of Junker landlords to have courts on their own estates in which they served as judge and jury—be submitted to him. As always when Bismarck saw his personal, patrimonial interests threatened, he went into action. He and his influential neighbour, Ernst von Bülow-Cummerow (1775–1851)1 submitted what came to be known as the Regenwald Reform Programme. The authors submitted the plan because they feared ‘that the King could find himself in the end moved to pay attention to the many sorts of attacks on patrimonial justice’. Their plan foresaw a district patrimonial court with a director and at least two lay judges. The judges would sit in the villages on a regular rota.2 Bismarck called assemblies of his fellow landowners in his own district on 7 January 1847 and spoke at the county diet on 3 March, the convention of the Magdeburg Knights’ Assembly on 20 March, and in between, on 8 March, as he reported three days later, he had had ‘a conversation of several hours with Ludwig von Gerlach, whose skills he found occasion to admire’.3 In the meantime the county diet had instructed him to prepare what we would now call a ‘position paper’ and authorized him to seek a meeting with the minister in Berlin to see how the government proposed to approach the issue. On 26 March 1847 Bismarck wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach and put forward his own plan, without von Bülow-Cummerow, for reform of patrimonial justice, which abolished individual estate courts and replaced them with local judicial districts where the landlords would elect a district judge in exactly the way local county assemblies elected their Landrat or county representative. Gerlach wrote shrewdly on the margin:

  Something which in time becomes feasible through a process of reconciliation, can be left for the moment to one side. The majority of estate judges and the most influential defenders of patrimonial justice would see this proposal as abolition.4

  Bismarck’s new political activity gave him tremendous pleasure. As he wrote to Johanna, he was ‘full of politics to the point of bubbling over’.5 He had found his purpose in life. Bismarck had become—and in that respect he always remained—a brilliant, persuasive and overwhelmingly convincing parliamentary politician. He had rushed around, talked to his constituents, got them to sign on to his suggestions, drafted resolutions, and eventually convinced them to adopt his radical reform proposals, which, as Gerlach noticed at once, amounted to ‘abolition’ of the traditional right to a patrimonial court. This was the first time Ludwig von Gerlach had to confront the force of nature he and his brother Leopold had unleashed but could not control.

  When Bismarck wrote to Johanna on 8 May 1847 that he had been elected a deputy to the United Diet, he described it as if it had happened without his agency. The Magdeburg electors ‘quite unusually elected me to the first position though I am new in the county and was not even an alternate deputy’.6 The truth was, as we have seen, very different. He had run a campaign to get his reform proposals for local patrimonial courts accepted which had made him very well known indeed to the Magdeburg and other electors.

  On 3 April 1847 King Frederick William IV invited the entire membership of the eight provincial parliaments in the Kingdom of Prussia to meet in a United Diet in Berlin. He took care to make this enterprise as medieval, feudal, romantic, and unlike the French National Assembly as possible, nothing to do with one man-one vote. Frederick William IV saw the ‘state as a work of art in the highest sense of the word. … he wanted to admit and incorporate into his cathedral those spiritual forces and persons who in any way recognized his kingdom.’7 Representation would be entirely in Stände or estates. The Lords would form the upper curia and knights, towns, and country communities the lower curia. He also took care, quite explicitly, not to recognize the promise made by his predecessor in 1815 that there would be a proper constitution for the Kingdom of Prussia and a parliamentary assembly, a promise which Frederick William III had evaded for twenty-five years. The new assembly would have no function save to approve new taxes.8 Although it had the trappings of feudalism, as Christopher Clark points out, the realities had changed from below. The provincial diets had been created in 1823:

  Although they looked like traditional Estate bodies, they were in fact representatives institutions of a new type. Their legitimacy derived from a legislative act by the state, not from the authority of an extra-governmental corporate tradition. The deputies voted by head, not by estate, and deliberations were held in plenary session, not in separate caucuses as in the corporate assemblies of
the old regime. Most importantly of all, the ‘noble Estate’ (Ritterschaft) was no longer defined by birth (with the exception of the small contingent of ‘immediate’ nobles in the Rhineland) but by property. It was the ownership of ‘privileged land’ that counted, not birth into privilege status.9

  What Burke and von der Marwitz had most feared had reached the Prussian countryside; the land, in Burke’s term, had been ‘volatized’, turned into a commodity to be bought and sold. Clark writes that ‘in 1806 75.6% of noble estates in the rural hinterland of Königsberg were still in noble hands. By 1829 this figure had fallen to 48.3%.’10

  The King called the new United Diet because a combination of economic distress and intellectual discontent forced him to do so. Between 1815 and 1847 the world had changed dramatically. For reasons which demographers still debate, European population began to grow in the middle of the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth as Table 1 shows:11

  Table 1. The population of Germany (within the borders of 1871) (millions)

  After 1815 England’s industrial revolution produced huge volumes of machine-made goods and British factories flooded European markets with cheap textiles. Domestic craftsmen with their traditional hand looms could not compete; hunger crises—in effect, localized famines—in the Rhineland in 1816–17, in eastern Westphalia in 1831, and in Posen and East Prussia in 1846–7 created unrest and frightened the possessing classes. Bad harvests still meant ruin for local farmworkers, especially if the large estate concentrated on exports. As in the Irish famine of 1845, the impossibility of moving goods before railroads meant that people starved to death when ample supplies lay just beyond their reach. In south-western Germany, partible inheritance, that is, dividing family land equally among the sons, led to subdivisions of family property and what came to be known as the Zwergwirtschaft (dwarf economy). Even though these peasants were free, their smallholdings led to grinding poverty. Finally, the post-war crisis after 1815 had been accompanied by falling prices. Weak harvests and particularly severe winters in 1819 and the mid-1840s made for widespread misery. Though nobody could yet feel it, agricultural productivity had risen and gave promise of a better-fed future. Pflanze shows that in Prussia agricultural productivity in the years 1816 to 1865 went up by 135 per cent whereas the population rose by 59 per cent.12 As soon as the crops could be transported more easily, and that came with railroads, famine in Germany would disappear. Europe was still far from urbanized, as Table 2 shows. By 1850, only England had really begun to generate serious urban growth.