Table 2. Proportion of population living in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants
The table shows that Prussia in 1850 belonged among the backward continental European states. Though the city of Berlin had grown, Prussia remained overwhelmingly rural and far behind the urban growth in Britain. That too was beginning to change but nobody saw it yet in 1847.
Railroads had just started to transform European life. During the 1830s and 1840s railroad companies sprang up and the first primitive, short lines were built. Within twenty years, European travel and trade had been revolutionized by the railroad boom (see Table 3).13
Table 3. Spread of railways in selected countries (Length of line open in kilometers (1km = 5/8 mile))
German railroad growth outstripped in speed and scale every other continental country. In the 1840s there was a short-lived German railroad ‘bubble’ as speculative investment piled into the new joint stock companies and raised share prices on insecure foundations. In 1843 a series of bankruptcies set off the first modern depression, though still very small in scale, at the same time that the last European famine crisis had hit East Prussia.
In August 1846 Bismarck wrote to his brother to describe the terrible economic situation in Schönhausen. There had been a prolonged drought and crops were ruined:
There is absolutely no money in Schönhausen. Daily wages amount to more than 60 thaler a week and with the meadows we are far from finished. In the cash drawer there is nothing and no income to be expected in the near future. In the brick works we have to offer very long credit if we do not want to damage the customers.14
In April of 1847 he saw the first riots in Cöslin, a medium-sized town in middle Pomerania, 15 miles south of the Baltic sea coast (Kozalin in Polish today). Bismarck described them in a letter to Johanna:
In Cöslin there was uproar, even after 12 the streets were so full that we could only get through with difficulty and under the protection of a unit of reserve militia which had been ordered in. Bakers and butchers have been plundered. And three houses of corn merchants ruined. Glass slivers all over … In Stettin a serious bread riot, apparently 2 days of shooting, and artillery was supposed to be deployed. It will very probably be an exaggeration.15
On Sunday, 11 April 1847, 543 deputies assembled in Berlin for the largest such assembly ever held on German soil. As David Barclay writes, ‘the public mood in Berlin seemed to reflect the weather … The winter had been long and hard. Food shortages and unemployment were becoming increasingly serious problems, and spring had still not arrived. The day was cold and blustery, with a mixture of snow and freezing rain.’16 The King’s mood was solemn and serious. When he delivered his Speech from the Throne he made clear the limited power of the assembly he had convened:
There is no power on earth that can succeed in making me transform the natural relationship between prince and people … into a conventional constitutional relationship, and I will never allow a written piece of paper to come between the Lord God in heaven and this land.
After this encouraging start, the King pointed out that by calling the United Diet he had merely followed the provisions of the State Indebtedness Act of 1820, which required a meeting of the Estates to authorize new taxes.17 The members of the diet, regardless of their political views, were stunned. Count Trautmannsdorf declared that the speech had ‘hit the assembly like a thunderbolt … With one blow the Stände have seen their hopes and desires obliterated; not one happy face left the assembly.’18
The odd thing about the diet was how quickly and naturally it turned itself into a normal parliament with all the courtesies and practices of parliamentary life complete with forms of address such as ‘the Honourable Gentleman, the previous speaker’, and so on. Of the deputies, the overwhelming majority belonged either to the bourgeois liberal groups or the aristocratic Prussian liberal group under the Westphalian Freiherr Georg von Vincke. The group of nay-sayers who rejected any move to transform the gathering into a proper parliament was not large. Erich Marcks estimates that the ‘aristocratic ultras’ who refused even the slightest alteration in the King’s absolute power, cannot have been more than 70, among whom Otto von Bismarck numbered.19 This was his first public stage and he knew by his innate instinct for showmanship exactly how to use the platform it offered. On 17 May 1847 Bismarck made his maiden speech, as the first speech by a new member in the House of Commons is called. It was a sensational debut. In a manner not unlike the way the young ‘fox’ Bismarck became the darling of his duelling fraternity, Bismarck outraged the other deputies. He denied that the enthusiasm of 1813, the so-called ‘Prussian Rising’, had anything to do with liberalism or a demand for a constitution. He portrayed the popular movement against French occupation in a way that mocked the central myth of Prussian liberalism—that the free people had risen to throw out Napoleon and the French in a War of Liberation. It is hard to grasp how offensive Bismarck’s remarks were. A whole generation of Prussian liberals had lived through the cold days of reaction by warming their hopes on the glorious memories of the people’s war for liberty, which Bismarck belittled. As the stenographic report of the proceedings records, Bismarck asserted that the revolt of 1813 had nothing to do with constitutional liberalism:
as if the movement of 1813 could have other motives ascribed to it or indeed, as if another motive were necessary, than the disgrace that foreigners in our country brought …
Stenographic report: murmuring and loud shouting interrupts the speaker; he draws the Spenersche Newspaper from his pocket and reads it until the Marshall has restored order. He then continues
It does the national honour a poor service (continued murmurs) if one assumes that the mistreatment and humiliation which the foreign power holders imposed on Prussia were not enough on its own to bring their blood to boiling point and to let all other feelings be drowned out by hatred of the foreigner.
(Great noise; Several deputies ask to speak. Deputies Krause and Gier dispute the speaker’s right to judge the nature of the movement, which he had not lived through.)20
Otto von Bismarck had arrived on the Prussian political stage, which he was never again to leave until his death in July 1898, and the appearance has all the characteristics of his later speeches in the Landtag and the Reichstag: complete contempt for the members of these bodies, dramatic gestures, violent ideas couched in sparkling prose but delivered in easy conversational tones. He consistently chose conflict over consensus and saw in such clashes what Clark calls a ‘clarifying element’. Erich Marcks agrees:
The lasting peculiarities of his temperament and his way to judge things show up on the very first day and the entirety of his performance contains—I want to say in the ground tones—the whole Bismarck.21
However bold he appeared at the speaker’s podium, the uproar had slightly unnerved him. The next day he wrote to Johanna:
I tried my luck at the speaker’s platform and aroused yesterday an unheard of storm of displeasure in that body through an observation, not entirely clearly phrased, about the nature of the popular movement in 1813. I wounded the misunderstood vanity of many from our party and naturally caused a great big hello! from the opposition. The bitterness was particularly great because I only said the truth when I applied the sentence to 1813 that somebody (the Prussian people) who gets beaten by somebody else (the French) to the point where he finally defends himself can hardly claim to have done a great service to a third person (the King).22
This was not exactly a stenographic account of what he said; indeed, it was false. Here we meet another permanent and not very agreeable feature of Bismarck’s character: he never took full responsibility for his acts. Forty years later he had still not found the courage to take responsibility for his mistakes, even in small personal matters. That Bismarck should have concealed the actual content of the speech from his wife reflects his constant need to be seen to be right, not unusual in politicians, but in Bismarck’s case the scale of the correction of his own history has the proportion
s of his own gigantic ego.
A few days later, Ernst von Bülow-Cummerow met Moritz von Blanckenburg and complained about Bismarck’s outrageous behaviour:
‘I had always considered Bismarck a sensible chap. I cannot understand how he can disgrace himself in this way.’ Blanckenburg replied, ‘I think he was entirely right and I am delighted that he has tasted blood. You will soon hear the lion roar in an entirely different way.’23
Bülow-Cummerow was not an obscure Junker but by far the most famous and widely read aristocratic pamphleteer, and defender of knightly supremacy, who also advocated the application of modern agricultural technology to Junker agriculture and the development of rural banking facilities in which he himself had engaged, and demanded freedom of the press. Bülow-Cummerow, unlike most of his neighbours, had not been ‘born again’ and remained untouched by Evangelical Christianity. He had one of the biggest Junker estates in Pomerania, and when in 1848 a ‘Junker Parliament’ met he was the obvious choice to be its Speaker.24 Bülow-Cummerow could not understand why Bismarck stirred up unnecessary trouble. He, as a sensible, large landowner, would never have done that.
Within a few days Bismarck had taken a leadership position among the ultra-conservatives, as he explained in a letter to Johanna four days after his maiden speech. He first apologized for not going to Reinfeld, the estate of his in-laws, the Puttkamers, where his fiancée pined for him, over Whitsun because every vote counted and he had to stay in or near Berlin. First things first with Bismarck. He then observed:
I have succeeded in gaining influence over a large number, or in any case several, deputies from the so-called Court Party and the other ultra-Conservatives, which I use as far as I can to keep them from bolting and attempting clumsy jumps to the side which, now that I have spelled out my direction unmistakably, I can do in the least suspect way.25
To obtain superiority over the extreme conservatives in the United Diet of 1847, Bismarck turned himself into the most extreme of extremists, the wildest of reactionaries, and the most savage of debaters. All that he could shed as easily as he took off his extravagant costume at Göttingen when he returned with Motley to his rooms. A sensible man like Bülow-Cummerow could not understand the demonic game unfolded before his eyes; very few could.
On 8 June, he wrote to Johanna:
In general I am well and calmer than before, because I have taken a more active part than before … the deliberations have become very serious because the opposition makes everything into a party matter. I have made myself many friends and many enemies, the latter more inside, the former more outside, of the Landtag. People, who before did not want to know me and others whom I do not yet know, overwhelm me with courtesies, and I get many well meaning squeezes from unknown hands … The political assemblies after the Landtag in the evening are a little wearing; by nightfall I come back from my ride, and then go right to the English House or into the Hotel de Rome, and get so deeply involved in politics that I never get to bed before 1.26
Bismarck had found a passion for politics, the attendant intrigues, and, I suspect, the growing awareness of his enormous intellectual and personal superiority over the other deputies and their backers. He plunged into politics the way he had hunted in the ‘mad Junker’ phase, taking risks, drinking too hard, and riding too fast. Above all, he loved the power to manipulate others. The word ‘intrigue’ pops up again and again in his private correspondence. And then there were other opportunities in his new position of prominence, and the handsome, blonde, 32-year-old giant knew how to value them. On 22 June 1847 he wrote to Johanna, ‘The day before yesterday we were with our friend the King and I was very spoiled by their Highnesses.’27
His next major speech took place in the debate on the removal of civil disabilities for Prussian Jews. We saw in Chapter 2 that for Junkers like Ludwig von der Marwitz liberalism and equality for Jews meant that ‘our old, venerable Brandenburg-Prussia will become a new-fangled Jewish state’.28 Friedrich Rühs had declared in 1816 unequivocally that ‘a Christian state can therefore absolutely not recognize any other members than Christians’.29 The only good Jew for the Junker Pietists was a converted Jew. When the United Diet debated the Jewish question on 14 June 1847, General Ludwig August von Thile, president of the Berlin Mission to the Jews, argued in these words against full rights for Jews:
I have also heard today that Christianity and even religion should play no role in the discussions of the state; but one of the honourable delegates put this in words which I could heartily endorse when he said ‘Christianity should not be constituted within the state. It should be above the State and should govern it’. With this I heartily agree … He [a Jew] may be the born subject of another nation, he may out of private interest or out of a feeling of general love for humanity make great sacrifices to the circumstances in which he lives, but he will never be a German, never be a Prussian because he must remain a Jew.30
On 15 June 1847 it was Bismarck’s turn to address the United Diet on civil equality for Jews:
I admit that I am full of prejudices; I have sucked them in, so to speak, with the mother’s milk and I cannot succeed in talking them away; if I should imagine having before me, as a representative of the King’s Sacred Majesty, a Jew whom I would have to obey, I must confess that I would feel deeply depressed and humiliated, that the feeling of pride and honour would leave me with which I now endeavour to discharge my duties towards the state.31
In this case Bismarck merely expressed what almost all of his Junker colleagues thought and here, for a change, he belonged to the majority. On 17 June 1847 the United Diet rejected by 220 to 219 the right of Jews to hold public office or serve in the Christian State.32 A few days later on 23 July 1847 the Judengesetz (the Jew Law) forbade Jews from exercising so-called ständische rights, that is rights inherent in class and status. Thus membership in district or provincial diets was closed to them and also the exercise of any rights associated with the knightly estate-ownership, even though a few wealthy Jews had purchased country estates which conferred such rights on them as owners.33
The extreme right-wing party of Bismarck and his friends had become—in spite of their protestations—a parliamentary party and, within a little more than a year, Prussia would have a constitution. They needed an ideology and, as Robert Berdahl writes, ‘they needed an ideology that developed a theory of strong monarchical power without at the same time, succumbing to bureaucratic absolutism’ and in 1847 all they had was the inadequacy of the traditional patrimonial justifications of Adam Müller and Carl Ludwig von Haller which compared the state to an enlarged family.34
Help came from a most remarkable and now largely forgotten figure, Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–61). Born in Würzburg in an orthodox Jewish household, as Julius Jolson, he took the name ‘Stahl’ and added Friedrich when he converted to Lutheranism on 6 November 1819. Stahl became the philosophical and legal brain of the conservative moment. He wrote a two-volume philosophy of law which attacked not only the Enlightenment philosophers but the entire natural law tradition. Stahl had the intellectual power to take on Hegel and offer an alternative, subjective view of the basis of law. The exclusive reliance on reason was ‘as if one considered the eye as the source of light and wanted to discover history not through the observation of events but by examining the inner construction of the eye and its various parts’.35 He argued for an essentially Burkean conception of history and institutions but based it not on historic liberalism but on a profoundly orthodox Lutheran view of man’s sinfulness and failings.
Elected to the Upper House in 1848 he joined the thirteen extreme conservatives among the members and rapidly became their leader. His biographer, Ernst Landsberg, notes what he calls an ‘almost world-historical irony’ in the fact that the party of neo-Pietist Christian great landowners should have found its intellectual leader in this tiny, delicate little bourgeois, ‘simple in his habits, excruciatingly polite to everybody … dressed in his chosen black suits more that of a cler
gyman than a professor of law, his speaking in a sharp voice but without pathos, in his external appearance the very type of his origins’, that is, the little Jewish professor.36 When Stahl died on 10 August 1861, Hans von Kleist wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach:
One can truly say that Stahl was the House of Lords. He gave it intellectual significance and thus weight in its decisions in contrast to those of the other House, the Government and in the country at large. He was the soul of his ‘Fraction’ [the German word for a party grouping—JS], and it determined things again up to the present in the whole house.37
Gerlach, who belonged to the ‘born again’ wing of Lutheran piety, was not so sure. Six years later he wrote to a friend,
It is painful to write this about a dear friend, who fought so bravely and in whose soul I took such delight and strength and edification, but you have forced me to do so … he fell for the most part into a vulgar constitutionalism and sought only to temper it in a conservative manner through Christian moral feelings.38
Bismarck: A Life Page 11