Jonathan steinberg bismarck a life (v5 0)

BISMARCK
A LIFE

JONATHAN STEINBERG


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Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Steinberg
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steinberg, Jonathan.
Bismarck: a life / Jonathan Steinberg.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-978252-9 (alk. paper)
1. Bismarck, Otto, Fürst von, 1815-1898. 2. Statesmen—Germany—Biography.
3. Germany—Politics and government—1871–1888. I. Title.
DD218.S795 2011
943.08′3092—dc22
[B]


2010045387

135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper


To my partner, Marion Kant


Contents
Preface
Maps
1 Introduction: Bismarck’s ‘Sovereign Self’
2 Bismarck: Born Prussian and What That Meant
3 Bismarck: The ‘Mad Junker’
4 Bismarck Represents Himself, 1847–1851
5 Bismarck as Diplomat, 1851–1862
6 Power
7 ‘I have beaten them all! All!’
8 The Unification of Germany, 1866–1870

9 The Decline Begins: Liberals and Catholics
10 ‘The Guest House of the Dead Jew’
11 Three Kaisers and Bismarck’s Fall from Power
12 Conclusion: Bismarck’s Legacy: Blood and Irony
Notes
Bibliography
Photographic Acknowledgements
Index


Preface
In a preface authors thank those who helped them. In the internet age he or she will certainly not
know some of the most important of them: the anonymous librarians, archivists, scholars,
researchers, and technicians who put precious resources on line, digitalize catalogues, contribute
to online encyclopedia and great reference books such the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography or the Neue deutsche Biographie. How can I thank personally the archivists at the New
York Times who provided online the report in its original typeface of the wedding in Vienna on 21
June, 1892 of Herbert Bismarck and Countess Marguerite Hoyos? No Bismarck biographer before
me has enjoyed such a wealth of unexpected, unusual and fascinating new material. Whatever the
weaknesses of this work, the author had access to more remote and essential material than any
predecessor, no matter how diligent, could have exploited.
I know the names of others without whom I could not have written this biography. Tony Morris,
publisher and friend, asked me to write a life of Bismarck, and Andrew Wheatcroft, publisher,
historian, and friend, saved the project when the first publisher abandoned it. Through Andrew
Wheatcroft I gained the help of the perfect literary agent, Andrew Kidd of Aitken Alexander, who
guided it safely to Oxford University Press where Timothy Bent steered it through its rough early
stage and encouraged me to cut it to a less unwieldy size. His skill and editorial expertise helped
me polish and polish again the slimmed down manuscript.
My friend and colleague, Chris Clark, author of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of
Prussia, 1600–1947, read the first draft, all 800 pages, with a care and attention to errors and

misinterpretations that only he could have given. Karina Urbach, author of Bismarck’s Favourite
Englishman: Lord Odo Russell’s Mission to Berlin, gave me the benefit of her great knowledge of
the period and of German society. Rabbi Herb Rosenblum of Philadelphia passed on to me the
astonishing fact that in 1866 Bismarck had attended the dedication of the Oranienburg Street
Synagogue in Berlin.
An author fortunate enough to be published by Oxford University Press gets two publishers for
the price of one. Timothy Bent and his colleagues at 198 Madison Avenue welcomed me with
every kind of assistance and support. Luciana O’Flaherty, Publisher, Trade Books, and her
colleagues at Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Phil Henderson, Coleen Hatrick,
and Matthew Cotton have been an author’s ‘dream team’. Deborah Protheroe found illustrations
that I had missed and put up with my foibles about the pictures. Edwin Pritchard copy-edited the
text with skill and tolerance of the author’s irregular habits. Claire Thompson, Senior Production
Editor, guided me through the final stages of proof-reading and indexing. Joy Mellor proof-read the
text.
Nothing in my long professional career has been as much fun as the composition of this work. I
got to ‘know’ the most remarkable and complex political leader of the nineteenth century and had
(and still have) the illusion that I understand him. I met and read the letters and diaries of the
greatest figures in Prussian society. That ‘imagined society’ took me away from, and made me a
nuisance to, my family, but all of them supported the enterprise in every way and gave me their
love and good cheer, which kept my spirits up. Without my partner, Marion Kant, I could never
have written the book and I have dedicated it to her.


Philadelphia, PA
October 2010


Map 1 Map of Germany showing the political boundaries in 1786.

Map 2

Map 3


1
Introduction: Bismarck’s ‘Sovereign Self’
Otto von Bismarck made Germany but never ruled it. He served under three royal masters, any one
of whom could have dismissed him at any moment. In March of 1890 one did. His public speeches
lacked all the characteristics that we would normally call charismatic. In September of 1878, at the
height of his power and fame, the newspaper Schwäbische Merkur described one of Bismarck’s
speeches in the Reichstag:
How astonished are those who hear him for the first time. Instead of a powerful, sonorous
voice, instead of the expected pathos, instead of a fiery tirade glowing with classical
eloquence, the speech flows easily and softly in conversational tones across his lips,
hesitates for a while and winds its way until he finds the right word or phrase, until
precisely the right expression emerges. One almost feels at the beginning that the speaker
suffers from embarrassment. His upper body moves from side to side, he pulls his
handkerchief from his back pocket, wipes his brow, puts it back in the pocket and pulls it
out again.1
Bismarck never addressed a mass meeting and only attracted crowds after he fell from power, by
which time he had become legendary.
From September 1862 to March 1890 Bismarck ruled in Germany but only as a parliamentary
minister. He made speeches of the above kind in various parliamentary bodies from 1847 to his
dismissal in 1890. He exerted his personal aura over his audiences but never led a political party
in the British sense at all. Throughout his career, the German Conservatives, the National Liberals,
and the Catholic Centre Party, the largest German parties, distrusted him and kept their distance.
The Bismarckian party, the so-called ‘Free Conservatives’, had influential members but no great
following outside the chambers. Much of Bismarck’s time and energy went into the nuts-and-bolts
of government administration. He dealt with everything from international treaties to whether stamp

duty belonged on postal money orders, an issue—oddly enough—which led to one of his many,
many resignations.
He had no military credentials. He had served briefly and very unwillingly in a reserve unit as a
young man (in fact, he tried to evade conscription, a scandal which the official edition of his
papers omitted) and had only tenuous claims to the uniforms he always wore—to the
embarrassment or fury of ‘real’ soldiers. As one of the so-called ‘demi-gods’ on General Moltke’s
staff, Lieutenant Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf, wrote in 1870, ‘The civil servant in the
cuirassier jacket becomes more impudent every day.’2
He had a ‘von’ in his name and came from a ‘good’ old Prussian family but, as the historian
Treitschke wrote in 1862, he was apparently no more than a ‘shallow country-squire’.3 He had the
pride of his social rank but understood that many occupied higher rungs than he. One of his staff
recalled an instance:
Most of the table-talk was provided by the Chancellor … Hatzfeldt [Paul Count von


Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg] would also take part in the conversation, because in the
Chancellor’s eyes, he enjoyed the highest social standing. The other members of the staff
usually remained silent.4
He and his brother inherited estates but not rich ones. Bismarck had to keep his expenses down
for most of his career. In a society in which court and courtiers occupied the centre of political life
and intrigue, Bismarck stayed at home, dined at an unfashionably early hour, and spent much of his
later career in the country as far from Berlin as possible.
In a famous passage written in 1918, as Bismarck’s empire began to collapse, Max Weber, one
of the founders of modern sociology, asked why we obey the authority of the state. He identified
three forms of authority or what he called ‘legitimations’. The first was
the authority of the ‘eternal yesterday,’ i.e. of the mores sanctified through the
unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is ‘traditional’
domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.
The third was:
domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and

functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules.
But it was the second that constitutes Weber’s greatest contribution to our understanding of
politics, legitimation by what he defined as charisma:
There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the
absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other
qualities of individual leadership. This is ‘charismatic’ domination, as exercised by the
prophet or—in the field of politics—by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the
great demagogue, or the political party leader.5
None of these definitions completely describes Bismarck’s authority. As a royal servant, he fits
Weber’s first category: his power rested on tradition, ‘the authority of the “eternal yesterday”’. As
a prime minister and head of administration, most of the time he behaved exactly as Weber defined
his third category: ‘domination by virtue of “legality” … based on rationally created rules’. He
was not conventionally, as we have seen, ‘charismatic’.6
In spite of that, Bismarck controlled his contemporaries so utterly that the words ‘tyrant’ and
‘dictator’ occur again and again in the letters and memoirs of those who lived under him. Prince
Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, four years younger than Bismarck, and after his
dismissal one of his successors, described a visit to Berlin a few months after Bismarck left office:
I have noticed two things during the three days that I have now been here: first, that no one
has any time and that everyone is in a greater hurry than they used to be; secondly that
individuals seem to have grown larger. Each separate personality is conscious of his own


value. Formerly the individual was oppressed and restricted by the dominant influence of
Prince Bismarck, but now they have all swelled out like sponges placed in water.7
I realized that I needed a new term to explain the Bismarck story. Bismarck commanded those
around him by the sheer power of his personality. He never had sovereign power but he had a kind
of ‘sovereign self’. As the Emperor William remarked, ‘it’s hard to be Kaiser under Bismarck.’8 In
him we can see the greatness and misery of human individuality stretched to its limits. Take the
case of the speech on 17 September 1878, which I cited above. Afterwards Bismarck flew into a
rage at the humble stenographers who took down the debates in the Reichstag, and described his

dark suspicions a month later on 4 October, 1878, to one his aides, Moritz Busch, who recorded it:
The shorthand stenographers turned against me in connection with my last speech. As long
as I was popular that was not the case. They garbled what I said so there was no sense in
it. When murmurs were heard from the Left or Centre, they omitted the word ‘Left’ and
when there was applause, they forgot to mention it. The whole bureau acts in the same
way. But I have complained to the President. It was that which made me ill. It was like the
illness produced by over-smoking, a stuffiness in the head, giddiness, a disposition to
vomit etc.9
Consider that evidence. Could a sane man seriously believe that a conspiracy of stenographers
had developed in the duller corridors of the Reichstag to undermine the greatest statesman of the
nineteenth century? And the illness as a result? Hypochondria hardly does justice to the complaints.
Lieutenant Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf had no doubt: on 7 December 1870 he confided to
his diary ‘Bismarck begins really to be ready for the mad house.’10 Yet he never got there. He
remained sane in his way and healthy in spite of his fears and powerful—though never enough for
his desires—from his forties to his seventies. He held office for twenty-eight years and
transformed his world more completely than anybody in Europe during the nineteenth century with
the exception of Napoleon, who was an Emperor and a General. Bismarck did it while being
neither the one nor the other.
This book is, therefore, a life of Otto von Bismarck because the power he exercised came from
him as a person, not from institutions, mass society or ‘forces and factors’. The power rested on the
sovereignty of an extraordinary, gigantic self. What exactly that means has defied precise definition
throughout the history of humanity. Here I mean that combination of physical presence, speech
patterns and facial expressions, style in thought and action, virtues and vices, will and ambition,
and, perhaps, in addition, a certain set of characteristic fears, evasions, and psychological patterns
of behaviour that make us recognizable as ‘persons’, the selves we project and conceal, in short,
what makes people know us. Bismarck somehow had more of every aspect of self than anybody
around him, and all who knew him—without exception—testify to a kind of magnetic pull or
attraction which even those who hated him could not deny. His writing has a charm, flexibility, and
seductiveness that conveys something of the hypnotic effect his powerful self had on those who
knew the living Bismarck.

Only biography can even attempt to catch the nature of that power. This biography tries to
describe and explain the life of the statesman who unified Germany in three wars and came to
embody everything brutal and ruthless about Prussian culture. The real Bismarck was a complex


character: a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed
tears, a convert to an extreme form of evangelical Protestantism, who secularized schools and
introduced civil divorce. He always wore uniform in public after a certain stage in his career but
he was one of the few important Prussians who never served in the King’s regular army. His
fellow Junker aristocrats came to distrust him; he was too clever, too unstable, too unpredictable,
not ‘a proper chap’. But all agreed that he was brilliant. The British ambassador to Germany from
1871 to 1884, Odo Russell of the great Whig noble family, knew Bismarck well and wrote to his
mother in 1871: ‘The demonic is stronger in him, than in any man I know.’11 Theodore Fontane, the
Jane Austen of the Bismarck era, wrote to his wife in 1884: ‘When Bismarck sneezes or says
“prosit” it is more interesting than the spoken wisdom of six progressives.’12 But in 1891 after
Bismarck’s fall from power, Fontane wrote to Friedrich Witte: ‘[it was] not in his political
mistakes—which are, as long as things are in flux, very difficult to determine—but in his failings of
character. This giant had something petty in his nature, and because it was perceived it caused his
fall.’13
Bismarck was also that rare creature, ‘a political genius’, a manipulator of the political realities
of his time. His verbal, often improvised, analyses of politics delighted even some of his enemies.
General Albrecht von Stosch, whom Bismarck eventually had fired, saw both sides. In 1873, he
wrote to the Crown Prince:
It was again an enchantment to see the Imperial Chancellor in full spiritual activity. His
flights of thought can become quite striking, when the task of defending the Empire against
Prussian particularism falls upon him.’14
Several years before Stosch recorded a very different experience:
After a few days Bismarck let me come. He had previously seen in me a man who
admired his high intellect and his tireless energy and as long as I possessed a certain
importance in his effort to reach agreement with the Princess, I could enjoy the greatest

politeness and attention. Now I was just any one of his many aides and I had to feel that.
He sat me down and went over my report like a schoolmaster with a dumb and
particularly disobedient pupil … Bismarck always loved to give his staff proof of his
power. Their achievements were always his; if something went wrong the subordinate got
the blame, even if he had acted under orders. When later the Saxon Treaty was attacked
openly in public, he said that he had not seen the treaty until it was enacted.15
The belief that Bismarck was a political genius, which became universal among patriotic
Germans after the unification of Germany in 1870 and is, I think, correct, would have occurred to
almost nobody in 1862 when he became Minister-President of Prussia. But one influential person
had seen it much earlier and had a position in the King’s government. General Albrecht von Roon,
Minister of War from 1859 to 1873, who met Bismarck first as a teen-ager, understood from the
start that this remarkable person had the stuff of greatness. At Roon’s first audience with the Regent
and future King of Prussia on 4 December 1858, about his possible appointment as Minister of
War,16 he urged the Regent to name Bismarck head of government. And it was Roon who sent the
famous telegram of 18 September 1862: ‘periculum in mora. Depêchez-vous!’ (Danger in delay.


Make haste!), which gave Bismarck the sign that his hour of destiny had come.
When Roon’s best friend Clemens Theodor Perthes, professor of law at the University of Bonn
and founder of the Protestant ‘inner mission’, berated Roon in April 1864 for having engineered the
appointment of a man ‘who calculates so coldly, who prepares so cunningly, who has no scruples
about methods’17 Roon replied:
B. is an extraordinary man, whom I can certainly help, whom I can support and here and
there correct, but never replace. Yes, he would not be in the place he now has without me,
that is an historical fact, but even with all that he is himself … To construct the
parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has
already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one
cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by
combining it all.18
And Bismarck did just that—‘combining it all’.

Yet genius alone could not win power. No sensible monarch—and King William I of Prussia at
the age of 65 had good sense and years of experience—would have appointed Bismarck, who had
a reputation for utter unreliability, superficial cleverness and extremely reactionary views, unless
he had become desperate. The King’s brother, Frederick William IV wrote in 1848 ‘Bismarck—to
be used only when the bayonet rules without limit’19 but in the summer of 1862 a deadlock between
the Prussian parliament and the Crown over reform of the army had begun to frighten the royal
establishment. Memories of mobs in the streets of Berlin during the revolution of 1848 came back
to make the King and court nervous. As the liberal Max Duncker wrote: ‘The military are panting
after riots “as the hart panteth after the water-brooks” [Psalm 42, verse 1—JS].’20
Bismarck gained and held power by the strength and brilliance of his personality but he always
depended on the good will of his King. If William I had decided to dismiss Bismarck at the end of
September 1862, after the fiasco of ‘the blood and iron speech’, which all the members of the royal
family and most educated people in Germany condemned, Bismarck would have disappeared from
history and Germany would almost certainly have been unified by a voluntary federation of
sovereign princes. If William I had had the decency to die at the biblical ‘three score and ten’ in
1867, Bismarck’s creation, the North German Federation, might have eventually absorbed the
South German kingdoms but not through a devastating war. A ‘Liberal Era’ under Emperor/King
Frederick III and his energetic Liberal wife, the Princess Royal Victoria of Great Britain, might
have begun. We know the list of ministers Frederick wanted to appoint in 1888 when he was
already a dying man. All were liberal, which to Bismarck meant the British system of
parliamentary government, restricted royal power and the end of his dictatorship. Whether the new
Emperor, even if he had been healthy, had the strength of character to resist Bismarck, the Princess
Victoria, Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, had enough for both of them. There would have been a
clash, and Bismarck would have been dismissed. Germany might then have followed the British
model of liberal parliamentary control. We can say these things now because the actors promised
them at the time. William did not die at 70, nor at 80, nor at 90 but in 1888 at 91 and that longevity
of the old King gave Bismarck 26 years in office.
During those twenty-six years Bismarck forced the King again and again by temper tantrums,

hysteria, tears, and threats to do things that every fibre in his spare Royal Prussian frame rejected.
For twenty-six years Bismarck ruled by the magic that he exerted over the old man. Bismarck’s
career rested on personal relations—in particular, those with the King and the Minister of War—
but also with other diplomats, sovereigns, and courtiers. William I, King of Prussia and later
Emperor of Germany, ruled in part by the rules of written constitutions but in true Prussian tradition
also by the Grace of God, a Protestant, Prussian God. Bismarck needed no majorities in
parliament; he needed no political parties. He had a public of one. When that public changed,
during the ninety-nine days that the dying Frederick III spent on the throne, and when the dynamic
and unstable William II succeeded his father, Bismarck’s days were numbered. William II
dismissed him on 20 March 1890. As a Punch cartoon of the time put it, ‘the dropping of the pilot’.
But the person and the power existed in a real world. As Bismarck said, a statesman does not
create the stream of time, he floats on it and tries to steer. Bismarck operated within the limits of
the politically realistic and he frequently defined politics as ‘the art of the possible’. The reader
needs to know that context, those states and their relations, their government and leaders, the
economic and social changes, which turned Europe into the first ‘modern’ society during
Bismarck’s lifetime. Bismarck’s genius led him to see possibilities in the configuration of domestic
and international forces of the 1860s which allowed him to unify—or more accurately divide—
Germany by excluding the Austrian lands. He took bold steps, which stupefied his contemporaries,
but he lived long enough to fall victim to that maxim of Edmund Burke about unforeseen
consequences:
that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation;
and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The
reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements,
have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.21
Bismarck sprang the idea of universal suffrage on a startled German public in 1863 in order to
prevent King William from going to a congress of princes called by the Emperor of Austria. It
worked. The Austrian move failed. Prussia unified Germany and universal manhood suffrage
became the franchise for the new Reichstag, the lower house of parliament in the new German
Empire. Between 1870 and his fall from power, Bismarck lived out the truth in Burke’s maxim. By
1890 ‘very pleasing commencements’ had become in Bismarck’s eyes ‘lamentable conclusions’.

Germany had industrialized and a new sullen, hostile working class had appeared. The Catholic
population had survived persecution and their votes always produced a large parliamentary party.
Votes for everybody had by Burkean irony given parliamentary seats to Socialists and Catholics.
By 1890 Bismarck’s brilliant ploy of 1863 had begun to produce majorities made up of what he
called ‘enemies of the Reich’. By 1912, Catholics and Socialists, Bismarck’s ‘enemies’, together
had an absolute majority of seats in the Reichstag. Universal suffrage, which he had designed to
scupper an Austrian initiative in 1863 and to undermine the legitimacy of the lesser German
princely states, had yielded the ‘lamentable conclusion’ of legislative stalemate. As the late Enoch
Powell once observed, ‘all political careers end in failure’.
The life of Bismarck still matters today, for it expresses a more general problem than just those
described above. Bismarck shows us the strengths and weaknesses of the human self when it
exercises power. It shows how powerful the large self can be but it also shows how the exercise of


supreme political power never leaves its holders unchanged. Since Bismarck was one of the
greatest political figures of all times, he has had many biographers of various types. This biography
takes its place in a long and distinguished train: Erick Eyck, A. J. P. Taylor, Werner Richter, Edgar
Feuchtwanger, Edward Crankshaw, Otto Pflanze, Lothar Gall, Ernst Engelberg, and Katherine
Lerman. Then there are huge volumes of J. C. G. Röhl about Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany after
Bismarck, the brilliant study of Bismarck’s Catholic adversary, Windthorst, by Margaret Lavinia
Anderson, and dozens of other more specialized works. The Van Pelt Library of the University of
Pennsylvania lists 201 books with ‘Bismarck’ in the title. How does this book differ from its
predecessors? It does so in two ways: in its aim and in its method. The aim is easy to express and
probably impossible to do: to explain to author and reader how Bismarck exercised his personal
power. The method is to let those on whom the power was exercised, friend and foe, German and
foreign, young and old, anybody who experienced the power of Bismarck’s personality close up
and recorded the impact, tell the story. I have changed the conventional balance between comment
and evidence in favour of the latter. I want to recall the long silenced voices of the many, many
distinguished people who met Bismarck and wrote down what they saw. As Bismarck’s college
friend, the American John Lothrop Motley, explained to Lady William Russell about historical

research:
I go to my archives every day and take a header into the seventeenth century … It is rather
diverting … to take the dry bones out of the charnel house and to try to breathe into them a
fictitious life. Like Bertram in the third act of Robert the Devil, I like to set the sheeted
dead gamboling and pirouetting and making fools of themselves once more.22
My ‘sheeted dead’ do not make fools of themselves. They taught me who Bismarck was and
also who they were. Often they confirmed my view of another of Bismarck’s contemporaries by
expressing an opinion to which I had come on my own.
One example of many will explain the point. General Albrecht von Roon put Bismarck into office
and knew it. His reactionary and rigid views could not be further from mine, but he had an odd
purity and integrity which moved me. I discovered to my amazement the confirmation of that in an
unexpected place. Hildegard von Spitzemberg recorded in her diary on 7 August 1892 that she had
been reading Roon’s Denkwürdigkeiten (his memoirs), just published:
What a pious, decent, competent man, how loyal and yet how frank. One reads how much
annoyance he had to swallow from high and highest persons. And how charming his travel
descriptions, how touching his relationship to his wife, and his friends Perthes and
Blanckenburg.23
That two people from different worlds and times, an obscure academic in the twenty-first century
and a grand society lady of the nineteenth century, saw the same character traits, encouraged the
hope that my ‘feel’ for Bismarck’s personality and that of his contemporaries had a foundation.
Diaries gave me other unique pleasures. I got a glimpse into the toilet arrangements in the
1870s, when Christoph Tiedemann dined for the first time at the Bismarcks in 1875:
25 January. An interesting day! From 5 to 11 pm in the Bismarck house … The Prince


complained about poor appetite. Hats off! I would like to see him once with a good
appetite. He took second helpings from every course and complained about ill-treatment
when the Princess protested energetically against the enjoyment of a boar’s head in aspic.
He sipped the wine but drank lots of beer from a large silver tankard …
About 7.30 the Prince invited Sybel and me to follow him to his study. As a precaution he

offered us his bedroom, which was next to the study, as a place to relieve ourselves. We went in
and found under the bed the two objects we sought which were of colossal dimensions. As we
stationed ourselves at the wall, Sybel spoke seriously and from the depth of his heart,
‘Everything about the man is great, even his s—!!24
But the main witness is Otto von Bismarck himself. Bismarck wrote uninterruptedly for sixty
years. The official collected works run to nineteen volumes, quarto sized, with an average of more
than 500 pages each.25 Volume VIc alone runs to 438 pages just to include the reports sent to the
Kaiser, dictation notes, and other official writings from 1871 to 1890. Bismarck wrote thousands
of letters to family, friends, and others. He controlled both domestic and foreign policy for twentyeight years so his correspondence and official writing covered everything from the threat of war
with Russia to the state monopoly on tobacco. He seems to have made it his business to know
everything about everything. The result was a constant, furious absorption of material and equally
stupendous bouts of writing or dictation. Christoph Tiedemann, who served as Bismarck’s first
personal assistant from 1875 to 1880, recorded in his diary a typical work session with Bismarck
at Varzin, one of his country houses:
Yesterday I spent 2½ hours in his study, today he dictated the whole afternoon a letter to
the Emperor—in all 32 folio sides, not interrupted but written right through. He gave not
only an exact account of the negotiations with Bennigsen about his joining the cabinet but
at the same time a highly political account of the development of our entire party system
since the introduction of a constitution. The Prince dictated without stopping for five
hours, I repeat five hours. He spoke more quickly than usual and I could hardly keep up
with the flow of thought. The room was overheated, and I began to sweat terribly and
thought I might get a cramp. I decided quickly and without saying a word to take off my
jacket and throw it over a chair. I continued in shirt sleeves. The Prince, pacing up and
down, looked at me at first in amazement but then nodded at me with understanding and
continued without pause to dictate.26
As Bismarck aged and the strains of such a workload weighed more heavily, he became
irritable in a way that alarmed his closest collaborators. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen became a
member of Bismarck’s inner circle in 1870 and after 1879 was a cabinet minister in the Prussian
State Ministry. He saw Bismarck frequently and recorded the deterioration. As early as 1875 he
wrote increasingly anxious entries in his diary. Here are two:

22 February: It is a remarkable feature of Bismarck’s character, how intensively he
nurses thoughts of revenge and retaliation for real or imagined slights that he has suffered.
In his morbid irritability he feels as a wrong what from the other person was never
intended to be that … It was a highly comfortable evening. He ate, cutting the slices with


his own knife, half a turkey, and drank to wash it down a quarter or half a bottle of cognac
mixed with two to three bottles of Apollinaris. By day, he said, he cannot enjoy anything,
neither beer nor champagne, on the other hand cognac and water agree with him best. He
forced me to drink with him so that I did not see how much he consumed.27
4 March: the domestic situation changes kaleidoscopically quickly … Bismarck handles
all questions from his own personal point of view, is clearly not about to give up much of
his personal influence and changes his mind from day to day. When he himself does not
want to do something, he barricades himself behind the Kaiser’s will, when everybody
knows that he gets his way on anything if he really wants it.28
Imagine trying to govern under such a man who tolerates no dissent, who sees disagreement as
disloyalty and who never forgets an injury. As Friedrich von Holstein who had worshipped
Bismarck as a young diplomat, wrote later in his disillusion:
It was a psychological necessity for Bismarck to make his power felt by tormenting,
harrying and ill-treating people. His pessimistic view of life which had long since
blighted every human pleasure, left him with only one source of amusement, and future
historians will be forced to recognize that the Bismarck regime was a constant orgy of
scorn and abuse of mankind, collectively and individually. This tendency is also the
source of Prince Bismarck’s greatest blunders. Here his instinct was the slave of his
temperament and justified outbursts for which there was no genuine cause.29
This ‘future historian’ can agree only in part. The solitary bachelor and senior civil servant
Holstein wrote after 1906, embittered by the way he had been forced from office in the foreign
policy establishment. He wrote in deep despair about Germany and its situation. He had known
Bismarck intimately from 1861 and had once adored him. But this ‘future historian’ must also admit
how much Bismarck had coarsened and that what Holstein saw others recognized. But in foreign

affairs, he never—I think—behaved as he often did in domestic affairs—angrily and irrationally. In
foreign affairs he became the prisoner of forces he could not control but took entirely rational
action to deal with them as carefully as he could right to the end. The hand never lost its skill. In
domestic affairs too, Bismarck showed wisdom and far-sightedness in his introduction of a modern
system of accident, invalidity, and old age insurance but allowed his fear and hatred of socialism
to blind him on other social questions. Neither author nor reader should judge prematurely the
justice of Holstein’s indictment but accept, as we begin to follow the story of his life, that we have
to do with one of the most interesting, gifted, and contradictory human beings who ever lived.


2
Bismarck: Born Prussian and What That Meant
Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815, the fourth son of the landowner
Ferdinand von Bismarck and his wife, Wilhelmine Mencken, on the family estate in Schönhausen in
the Mark of Brandenburg to the east of Berlin. Before we consider the personal inheritance of Otto
von Bismarck, we have to look at the historical inheritance and note the exact historical moment
when he was born, the place of his birth, the meaning of ‘landowner’ in Prussia, which his father
was and he became, the social and political milieu into which the child was born, and finally the
ideas and values which those who stood by his cradle had in their heads. Ernst Engelberg called
Bismarck an Urpreusse, a basic or essential Prussian, and used the word as part of the title of his
two-volume biography.1 But what did it mean to be ‘Prussian’ and especially at that moment? For
Bismarck was born at the end of one period—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars—and
the beginning of a new one—the ‘long nineteenth century’, which saw the growth of democracy, the
modern state, and the emergence of capitalist industry.
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