Herbert never went to Venice and something certainly died in him as a result. Eberhardt von Vietsch concludes his biographical entry in the NDB by writing that it is possible ‘that his own will, especially in the struggle with his father over the marriage, had been broken.’ He became known for his ‘coarseness and contempt for people’.163 On New Years’ Day 1888 Hildegard Spitzemberg reflected on Bismarck’s family and especially on Herbert and Bill, his sons:
The sons get their light and glitter from the parents, but it is hard to take their ruthless pleasure-seeking, their gruff, materialistic tendencies, the brutal use of the right of the stronger, their complete lack of sensitivity for anything fine, educated, cultivated and disciplined. Their love of animals is attractive but the Princess often talks to me about Herbert, whose cynicism deeply troubles her and whom she would really love to see married.164
Herbert was ruined in ‘society’. He had behaved like a cad. He had let down a beautiful and valued member of high society and had not treated a woman with honour. He had breached a solemn promise of marriage, a legal offence. He was a coward, selfish, insensitive, and so on. General von Loë put it very clearly in his military brevity. ‘If Herbert were not the son of the Almighty Chancellor, he would be brought before a court of honour and it would be a farewell appearance.’165 Thus Bismarck’s infinite capacity to hate his enemies, indeed anybody who contradicted him, destroyed his eldest son and added to the long list of victims of the distorted and disturbed personality that his genius had allowed to go unchecked. Philipp Eulenburg, who knew everybody in the tragedy, concluded that Bismarck had made a terrible mistake:
Somebody who knew the Princess Elisabeth as well as I did inclines to the view that it was a mistake. For with the destruction of his deepest hope of happiness the son was driven not only into inescapable self-condemnation but also it must bring the pessimism and contempt for people in the once so happy and sunny nature, a development which damaged his future. The Prince had influenced his own future much more deeply by the transformation of his son’s character for which he bore the blame than he could have imagined as the waves of pain, of anxiety and his passion crashed over him.166
Herbert’s brutality, arrogance, and insensitivity undermined his father’s position and helped to bring about the end of his father’s chancellorship and his own career. Here from Waldersee’s diary is an example of Herbert’s impossible behaviour in public, after he became his father’s deputy as State Secretary in the Foreign Office. This event took place in December 1886:
On the Thursday, Count Lerchenfeld, the Bavarian Ambassador, gave a dinner for Prince Luitpold. At table Herbert Bismarck took the top place, ranked therefore above the Field Marshall, Stolberg, Puttkamer, Boetticher etc. He excused himself by saying that the Chancellor demands that at diplomatic functions the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs must have the first place. There will be a scandal. Moltke announced that he will no longer attend diplomatic dinners. The strange thing about the whole business is that Herbert accepted the place. Were he a sensible person, he would never have done it, now he has the whole reasonable world against him.167
Herbert, who had become a heavy drinker, died in 1904 just 55 years old, a victim of his father.
Bismarck too paid a price because he loved his cherished eldest son and knew what he had done. Wilhelm von Kardorff wrote to Bleichröder that ‘It seems to me that in political matters we are ailing because of Herbert and Venice; at least the renewed illness of the Chancellor must essentially be blamed on this.’168 Throughout May 1881 Bismarck had been unwell and, when Lucius visited him on 12 June, Bismarck’s condition shocked him. Bismarck had an infection in the veins of one of his leg and could not walk.
He lies on the sofa with the infected leg and with his stubble on unshaven beard looks old and doddery. Complained with a broken voice: ‘he must throw in the towel. He cannot go on. Nothing that he takes up can he get rid of …’ Bismarck has suffered terrible stomach cramps and passed blood. He blames the constant friction of his job but it must be caused by stomach ulcers … 169
His chief attending physician had finally given up treating his august but incorrigible patient. On 17 July Lucius noted in his diary that Dr Struck had asked to be relieved of the post of house doctor,
because his health is too fragile to bear the stress that the practice in the Bismarckian house involves. Dr Struck has learned to profit from Bismarck’s style. Tiedemann has repeatedly asked for a government presidency in either Trier or Bromberg, which Bismarck evidently holds against him. Why is he in such a hurry to get away from him?170
We know only too well why Tiedemann wanted to get away by this point in Bismarck’s career and the odd thing is that the perceptive Lucius could not see it.
On 27 October 1881 Reichstag elections took place. The results infuriated Bismarck because the main gainers had been his enemies. The two conservative parties lost heavily. The Reich Party lost half its seats and its share of the vote fell from 13.6 to 7.5 per cent. The Centre, solid as ever, gained seats to hit 100, but the big winners had been the left liberals, still split into three parties, but they were the clear victors. They increased their share of the vote by a fraction more than 15 per cent and together now had 109 seats, a gain of 86 seats, largely at the expense of the National Liberals, who had cooperated with Bismarck.171
Bismarck’s contempt for the public reached new heights of bitterness laced with dollops of self-pity. They had failed him again, as he told Moritz Busch:
The elections have shown that the German philistine still lives and allows himself to be frightened and led astray by fine speeches and lies … Folly and ingratitude on all sides. I am made the target for every party and group, and they do everything they can to harass me and would like me to serve as whipping boy for them. But when I disappear, they will not know which way to turn, as none of them has a majority or any positive views and aims. They can only criticize and find fault—always say, ‘No.’172
He also developed new symptoms, this time a facial neuralgia (trigeminal neuralgia) ‘like a sword being shoved through my cheek’.173
On 14 January 1882 the Landtag opened and Robert von Puttkamer represented the Minister-President, who was still away. One important item needed no emphasis and Puttkamer declared it with satisfaction: ‘the friendly relations to the present supreme head of the Catholic Church put us in the position to take account of practical needs by re-establishing diplomatic connections to the Roman Curia. The means to pay for this will be requested of you in due course.’ He also announced what came to be known as the Second Discretionary Bill, which would allow exiled bishops to be pardoned, eliminate the German culture examination for priests and pastors, and lift the Anzeigepflicht (compulsory notification to the Prussian state of clerical appointments) for assistant pastors.174
On 8 February Eugen Richter (1838–1906), leader of the Left Liberals and along with Windthorst and Lasker one of the critics who most provoked and enraged Bismarck, explained the compromise with the Catholics as part of a deep plan:
Prince Bismarck wants a docile majority … one that is also perhaps amenable to altering universal, direct, equal suffrage, for this, it seems to me, is now coming into question. That is the goal, and this bill is only one piece of the total policy that is meant to lead to it. Now, gentlemen, it must have been clear to Prince Bismarck that he cannot attain such a docile majority from Protestant districts alone. [Cheers from the Zentrum.] After the last election it may have become clearer still. He needs, therefore … tractable deputies from Catholic districts. Consequently it was obvious to him that he must seek a way to get those regions and their deputies into his special power, and such a means is this bill. That is the actual point to this matter. The Catholic clergy, gentlemen, are to be made hostages to the good behaviour of the Zentrum party. Other than this, this entire policy of discretionary authority has no purpose.175
Bismarck returned to Berlin for the Landtag and Reichstag sessions and on 18 F
ebruary Holstein saw him.
I asked him (B) if he was going to attend the debate on the Kulturkampf in the Landtag. ‘Why should I? The more undecided things are the better. The question is by its very nature an open one, and the conflict will never be resolved because ever since Colchas there has been a group of people in every nation who hold as an axiom, “We know God’s will better than the rest of you.” If I had been able to conduct the Kulturkampf entirely in accordance with my own ideas, I should have been satisfied with inspection of schools and the suspension of the Catholic Section of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs. But the attitude of the Conservatives obliged me to reckon with a majority which liked to beat the Kulturkampf drum as loudly as possible.’176
Once again we see all the characteristic features of Bismarck’s approach to politics: to leave affairs open-ended, or in the words used to Holstein, ‘the more undecided things are the better’, and that linked with denial of his responsibility for what had gone wrong. It was ludicrous to say, and by this time a disillusioned Holstein knew it, that ‘if I had been able to conduct the Kulturkampf entirely in accordance with my own ideas’. Whose ideas and whose absolute authority had been behind it, if not Bismarck’s? The frustration at his defeat came out in his furious attacks on Windthorst, who on 17 March 1882 wrote to Professor Heinrich Geffken: ‘I cannot speak with the Prince at all; the full bucket of his fury is pouring over me … Bismarck will not cease persecuting me until I lie in my grave.’177 These three attributes—wonderful flexibility of strategy and tactics, shirking responsibility for what went wrong, rage and brutality to his enemies—almost always ended in hypochondria and withdrawal to bed. Like clockwork that followed, as Lucius recorded on 5 March 1882, ‘For three weeks Bismarck has been unwell, sees no one, lets matters go, and gives no directives, neither on church nor on tax policy.’178
He got up from his bed on 27 March 1882 and admitted defeat in the Landtag. He surrendered two days before Windthorst was set to reintroduce the sacrament motion, and asked him if he would accept the bill if he (Bismarck) dropped the Anzeigepflicht completely. Windthorst accepted and the Conservatives did likewise. On 31 March 1882 the Second Discretionary Relief Bill, as amended, passed the Landtag.179 Bit by bit the apparatus of persecution of the Catholic Church had begun to come down. Bismarck had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Ludwig Windthorst and the Catholic Centre Party in the Reich and Prussia. On 24 April diplomatic relations between Germany and the Vatican were restored and on 25 April the Conservatives and Centre introduced a resolution to abolish completely the Falk system of interference with the disciplinary and pastoral life of the Catholic Church.180 The wounds would never entirely heal, as Catholics well into the twentieth century felt themselves to be second-class citizens. On 15 October 1882 many prominent Catholics, the leadership of the Centre, August Reichensperger, Windthorst, and others boycotted the national festival, in the presence of the Imperial Family, to celebrate the completion of Cologne Cathedral. On 31 October Windthorst wrote to Bishop Kopp, ‘We cannot be sure that Bismarck won’t make a coup de main [i.e. call a snap election] … Il est le diable.’181
On 14 November Lucius confided to his diary his distress at Bismarck’s handling of the end of the Kulturkampf:
Bismarck has underestimated the curia, the Conservatives say, and made great mistakes in dealing with it. All the concession made so far have not been matched by any concession on its part. He acts too hastily under angry impulses and listens to no advice.182
In October Bill Bismarck brought his doctor to see his father. Bill suffered from obesity and the doctor, a remarkable South German, Ernst Schweninger, seems to have helped him to lose weight. Schweninger, who was born in Freystadt in the Upper Pfalz, went to Munich, where he qualified as MD and had a brilliant career ahead of him. In 1879 he was arrested and sentenced to four months in prison for what a contemporary American newspaper called ‘an atrocious act in a public place’. His offence was against the widow of his best friend and it was committed at his grave, to which she had gone with flowers.183 Quite how Schweninger got to Bill Bismarck with that past is a mystery, but he did. Schweninger played an important part in Bismarck’s life and his treatment reveals certain traits in Bismarck’s psyche. Schweninger practised a type of medicine utterly at variance with the scientific, white-coated model dominant in the nineteenth century and not unknown in the twenty-first either. The handsome 32-year-old with his great black beard and sparkling eyes made an impression on Johanna von Bismarck, who had by this stage become desperate about ‘Ottochen’s’ health. On 10 October 1882 she wrote to Herbert: ‘We liked him very much, and now he has sent all kinds of little bottles for Papa.’184 But Schweninger brought something more fundamental to the bedside than little bottles; he brought a different way to treat patients.
In the academic year 1904–5 a young medical student Richard Koch (1882–1949) attended a seminar by Schweninger, now, of course, famous as Bismarck’s doctor. The seminar took place in the old Charité hospital building in Berlin:
Only a few students were present, all of them strange characters, young and old, types one usually meets in vegetarian restaurants. Dr Schweninger himself was a striking figure. At that time he was 55 years of age. He was of medium height, rather skinny, had pitch black hair as well as a big beard, very lively eyes, a typical Bavarian. He wore a top hat, morning dress, a white waistcoat and an elegant tie. This elegance was unusual for an academic and did not fit his rustic features.185
No other faculty member showed up in such garb; it caused a scandal—a doctor with no white coat! He said outrageous, unscientific things and enjoyed provoking his white-coated medical students. Koch only returned because he wanted to argue:
So I returned, got even angrier, but came again. Schweninger’s theory was roughly as follows: ‘school medicine treats illness as abstract things that seldom happen in reality, only in textbooks. One should not treat illnesses but ill people.’186 … Schweninger’s examination of patients had the students in an uproar. They argued with him but he had a way to deal with patients that nobody else taught. ‘There is a rule—answer as if you were the patient.’187
In May 1883 Schweninger arrived from Munich and began his treatment of his difficult patient. Here is his account of his first evening with Bismarck as told to K. A. von Müller:
Bismarck was on the verge of physical collapse. He believed that he had already had a stroke and suffered from severe headaches and complete sleeplessness. No treatment had done him any good. He mistrusted all doctors. A relative, [he said] had taken his life because of a similar disorder; ‘That will also be my fate’. ‘Tonight, your Highness,’ said the doctor, ‘you will sleep.’ ‘We shall wait and see,’ Bismarck replied sceptically. Schweninger wrapped him in a damp body roll [Leibwickeln] and gave him some drops of valerian, telling him, however, that it was not a sleeping potion. Then the doctor sat in the easy chair next to his bed and took one of Bismarck’s hands in his own, ‘like a mother with a restless child’ until the chancellor fell asleep. When he awakened in the morning, the doctor was still at his side and Bismarck could not believe that it was day and that he had actually slept the entire night. ‘From that moment, he trusted me.’188
Schweninger set out his therapeutic technique in these words:
I determined as far as possible the working time and the tasks to be undertaken during it; regulated the time and amount of recreation, exercise and rest; supervised eating and drinking, according to time, quantity and quality; regulated getting up and going to bed, intervened whenever necessary either to moderate or stimulate; and finally had the satisfaction of noting real progress in body and spirit.189
The pains, the facial neuralgia, and the headaches vanished; Bismarck was able to ride again. His weight began to go down as the list below shows (in pounds):
From 1886 on he never went above 227 pounds, a perfectly reasonable weight for a man of six feet four. Schweninger had, in effect, saved Bismarck’s life.190
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How did he do it? Richard Koch explained it this way:
The real secret of Schweninger’s power over Bismarck was in his absolute honesty. He did not hide behind scientific jargon but talked to him about his illness, treatment and cure in his own language … He felt the vocation to spread his conviction to destroy conservative ‘pseudo-scientific’ medicine and replace it by own new ‘natural way of healing’.191
Schweninger practised holistic medicine in the age of Pasteur and the white coat. It looked unscientific to his students in 1905 but it had one peculiar technical advantage that Bismarck’s previous physicians seemed unable to understand: Schweninger treated Bismarck, the person, who needed care and attention. One could say that he had come near to death by being Bismarck. His destructive urges and rages, his need for revenge, his paranoia and sleeplessness had psychological causes. They lay in the dark recesses of his colossal and complex nature. Bismarck made himself ill by his turbulent psychic reactions. He needed tender loving care and support, and, for reasons that we have seen, Johanna, angular, full of vindictiveness herself, stirred his hatreds rather than calmed them. She could not give that maternal care that he desperately needed. If we look at Schweninger’s own account of his first treatment, we see what he did. He put the child to bed, ‘wrapped in a damp body roll [Leibwickeln]’ (warmth of the womb?) and gave him ‘some drops of valerian, telling him, however, that it was not a sleeping potion’. Valerian is a herb that grows wild all over western Europe and probably worked because it came from the loving comforter. Then the doctor sat in the easy chair next to his bed and took one of Bismarck’s hands in his own, ‘like a mother with a restless child’. This is exactly what a parent does when a little child has a nightmare—holds his or her hand for comfort until the child falls asleep. Wilhelmine Mencken Bismarck failed to give the child Otto that elementary maternal care. He knew it and hated her for it. Schweninger saved Bismarck’s life by giving him a surrogate for that missing care and by controlling the eating habits of the entire family.
Bismarck: A Life Page 56