Bismarck

Katharine Lerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317900610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How did Bismarck, Germany's greatest nineteenth century leader, extend and maintain his power? This new Profile examines his strengths as statesman and all the facets of his political career. His many direct achievements included the unification of Germany and the expansion of Prussia. In short, he was the architect of Germany's change from cultural region to political nation. In the end he combined egotism and brilliance exceptionally, yet it was still not enough to save him from dismissal by William II.

Chapter 1

Personal Power

What kind of a man was Bismarck and how exceptional was his personality? Modern historians have rightly become reluctant to single out major historical figures for their individuality or their unique blend of qualities and no one today would attempt to argue that Bismarck would have achieved power and prominence irrespective of the historical conditions in which he found himself. Nevertheless, a discussion of Bismarck’s personality is important in seeking to explain why he eventually sought political power and how he exercised it. Moreover, Bismarck clearly developed a marked appetite for power and, at some deep psychological level, his will to power sprang from an inner necessity. He did not always seek power, but power became for him a means of self-realisation and self-fulfilment.

‘Bismarck’s whole person was calculated to impress, and he knew it’, the diplomat and later counsellor in the German Foreign Office, Friedrich von Holstein, recalled.¹ Long before he achieved virtually mythical status as the ‘Iron Chancellor’, represented in both monumental official pictures and satirical cartoons as a towering, forbidding figure wearing thigh-high cuirassier boots, Bismarck compelled notice. An early chalk drawing of Bismarck in 1826 as an 11-year-old boy suggests a mischievous urchin with a penetrating gaze. Philipp Petri’s porcelain picture seven years later reveals the brooding, dissatisfied countenance of a young man by no means reconciled to his existence.² Standing at an erect 6′ 4″ high, with reddish blond hair and a rather sallow complexion, Bismarck was quite slender as a youth. In his student days he enjoyed striding around Göttingen in unconventional clothes and accompanied by a large mastiff dog. With maturity he developed a powerful build, fuelled by his voracious consumption of food and drink, and upon his massive frame his head sometimes appeared peculiarly small. Those who heard him speak for the first time were often surprised, too, by his rather thin, high-pitched voice. As a public speaker Bismarck developed a caustic, sarcastic, confrontational style but, publicly and privately, he often spoke haltingly as he searched (usually successfully) for the right words.

Even as a young man Bismarck was supremely self-confident and physically courageous. He was a strong swimmer, singlehandedly rescuing two men and their horses from drowning in a lake in 1842, and an enthusiastic hunter of game. As a student he often lacked self-discipline and indulged in bouts of wild, unrestrained behaviour. He fought countless duels, the last one in 1852 when he already had three children under the age of 5 and risked his life in a shoot-out with the liberal politician Georg von Vincke (they both missed). Even as Prussian minister-president in 1865 he twice challenged another parliamentary opponent, Rudolf Virchow, to a duel, but his adversary, a surgeon, insisted he could only give satisfaction with the pen or the operating knife. Bismarck also attacked his would-be assassin in 1866, Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, seizing him by the neck and right arm as his assailant fired shots from his revolver. Bismarck possessed an explosive and unpredictable temperament, but he complained that most portrait painters gave him too violent an expression and failed to capture his sentimental, pensive nature. Emotional and prone to weeping, he precipitated the death of a favourite dog in 1877 by thrashing him for running away, and then he sobbed inconsolably with remorse. A reader of romantic fiction and professed lover of music, he refused to pay money to go to a concert and believed that music, like love, should be free.

Bismarck always attracted interest and notice, but it is questionable whether he allowed anyone in his life, even his wife and family, to know him intimately. An early female admirer, Marie von Thadden, confessed in 1843: ‘His fine carriage, his brilliance, both internal and external, attract me more and more. But when I am with him I always feel that I am skating on thin ice and might go through at any moment.’³ Friedrich von Holstein, encountering the 45-year-old Bismarck in 1861 when the latter was ambassador to St Petersburg, suggested that Bismarck thrived on constant strife. ‘Total impression one of a dissatisfied man, partly a hypochondriac, partly a man insufficiently reconciled to the quiet life led in those days by the Prussian representative in St Petersburg. His every utterance revealed that for him action and existence were one and the same thing.’⁴ The Prussian secretary of legation in St Petersburg and later minister at the Vatican, Kurd von Schlözer, came to much the same conclusion. ‘Bismarck is politics personified,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is fermenting within him, pressing to be activated and given form.’⁵

Family, education and early life

Bismarck’s childhood and youth offer few indications that he was a man destined to play a role of great historical significance. Especially in later life, he often dwelt on the unhappiness of his childhood and he blamed most of his early misfortunes on his mother whom he accused of coldness and even maternal neglect. But it can scarcely be argued that he encountered any significant degree of adversity in his early life or that his family circumstances nurtured any particular, unusual qualities or talents that proved beneficial to him in later life. For a man of his social class he had a fairly typical upbringing, with the notable exception that he was sent away to school at a relatively young age rather than being educated at home. But he never made the most of his education, at school or university, and by the time he was ready to embark on a career, he displayed little sense of direction or highly developed motivation. Nor is there any real evidence that he had much interest in politics before he was in his thirties.

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 on his father’s estate at Schönhausen, some 60 miles west of Berlin near the river Elbe in the Altmark of Brandenburg. He was born into the Prussian landowning nobility or Junker class whose history is closely intertwined with the rise of monarchical absolutism in Prussia and the growth of the modern state. Traditionally the power and privileges of the Prussian Junkers derived from their control of the land and the economy it supported, but in the course of the eighteenth century they had developed into a confident and cohesive ruling elite, combining their social power and material wealth with a pervasive ethos of state service. The Bismarcks could trace their ancestry back to the thirteenth century and Otto’s great-grandfather had excelled as an officer in the army of Frederick the Great.

Both contemporaries and historians have often sought to portray Bismarck as a typical representative of his social class, a man whose first interventions in public life were in defence of aristocratic privilege and who famously remarked during the revolution of 1848–49, ‘I am a Junker and mean to have the advantages of being one.’⁶ Nevertheless, it is too easy to see Bismarck as a man who expected to enjoy power and privilege by virtue of his birth and whose subsequent political activity and achievements were directed towards the preservation of the traditional Prussian political and social system. The Junkers were a hard-working nobility, neither parasitic nor ostentatiously wealthy, who were integrated into state and local hierarchies and thus peculiarly well placed to defend their interests and traditional way of life against the encroachments of an increasingly centralised and bureaucratic state. But in the fluid and unstable social conditions of the early nineteenth century, noble status could guarantee neither wealth nor power, even if it brought the expectation of social esteem. To survive materially, the Junker landowners had to adapt to new forms of property-ownership, a different kind of social dependency on the land and the growing pressures of a capitalist market economy. To survive politically, the ruling elite had to redefine its role in state politics and confront challenges to its traditional authority, for example the demand for popular representation and participation. That the Junkers as a social class were able to make these adjustments was not a foregone conclusion even by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Bismarck was the second surviving son of a marriage which has received close scrutiny from historians. Ferdinand von Bismarck was a fairly typical Junker of comparatively modest means who had given up his army career in 1795 to farm his estates (thus forfeiting the chance to fight in the wars of liberation against Napoleon) and who in 1816 moved his family from Schönhausen to Kniephof, one of three much smaller estates he had inherited in Pomerania. His wife, Wilhelmine Louise Mencken, appears to have been the dominant partner in the marriage and it has become customary for historians to emphasise her more middle-class origins as well as how her social ambitions and the educational choices she made for her two sons diverged from traditional Junker expectations.

The Menckens were not of noble birth and, despite investing in land, did not enjoy the same ties to the land as the Prussian landed aristocracy. Nevertheless, Ernst Engelberg has questioned Wilhelmine’s ‘bourgeois’ credentials and stressed that her world was not antithetical to that of the Bismarcks.⁷ The Menckens were doubtless more cultured and urbane (for there was nothing elegant or luxurious about the life of the average Prussian Junker) but they shared the ethos of monarchism and the tradition of state service. Wilhelmine’s father, Ludwig Mencken, came from Leipzig but he made his way to the top of the Prussian state bureaucracy, advising three successive monarchs, Friedrich II, Friedrich Wilhelm II and Friedrich Wilhelm III. Wilhelmine was his only daughter and she enjoyed the company of the royal children at the Prussian court, playing with the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his brother, who later became Kaiser Wilhelm I, before she married Ferdinand von Bismarck, then more than twice her age, when she was 17. Hence, despite the obvious differences in social milieu, it can be said that Bismarck’s parents came from complementary rather than conflicting backgrounds and that they shared a similar ideological outlook in their commitment to an enlightened monarchical absolutism. The couple were not particularly happy but this can be attributed to disparities in age, education, intelligence and social aspirations.

Bismarck was not really close to either of his parents, both of whom died before he attained high office. He later complained to his wife that his mother had shown him little affection, had mistakenly wanted her children to become intellectuals and, far from enjoying their company, had sent them off in the school holidays to their more congenial Uncle Fritz who lived near Potsdam. With his more lenient and less demanding father he professed a deeper, emotional bond. But here, too, a distance developed as he came to be embarrassed by his father’s uncouth behaviour and frequently blunt remarks. The tensions between Bismarck and his parents, complicated by his association of each parent with a different urban or rural environment, cannot be said to have ruined his childhood or made him unduly unhappy. But his later insistence that he felt estranged from his parental home from early childhood indicates anger and regret about his relationship with them. While his mother was alive he never felt he could live up to her exacting expectations; despite his affection for his father, the reality of their relationship always disappointed him. When he eventually married, Bismarck seems to have welcomed the opportunity to adopt his wife’s family as his own, while at the same time he left no one in any doubt that he was the head of the household.

Bismarck’s education was determined by his mother, who chose to send her sons away to school rather than educate them with the help of private tutors at home. From the age of 6 Bismarck attended the Plamann Institute in Berlin, by his account a very strict and spartan establishment where he felt imprisoned after the freedom of Kniephof and later complained he was always hungry. He then went on to attend two reputable Gymnasia or grammar schools in Berlin before studying law, the usual prelude to a career in state service, at the universities of Göttingen (one of the most dynamic academic institutions in central Europe at that time but not the usual choice for a Prussian) and Berlin.

There is little evidence that Bismarck exploited the educational and academic opportunities offered to him by these institutions. At school his best subjects were languages, but he proved to be an intellectually lazy pupil who preferred riding to studying and whose overall performance was well down in the bottom quarter of the class. He also wasted much of his time at university, although he may have gained insights into the relationship between foreign policy and economics from attending the lectures of the historian Arnold Heeren. Not very interested in ideas, he had a retentive memory and, as his letters reveal, considerable literary talent. But he read serious books about philosophy, politics or history only sporadically, culling what he needed from them and discarding the rest, and he much preferred the romantic works of Byron, Scott and Shakespeare. At Göttingen, Bismarck achieved a degree of notoriety on account of his striking appearance and wild lifestyle. Again by his own account he spent his time womanising, fighting duels, playing roulette and drinking his companions under the table, but he passed his exams by doing the bare minimum. He almost joined one of the radical student fraternities but soon gravitated to the Hanovera, an aristocratic duelling corps more appropriate to his social background and much less likely to jeopardise a future political career. In January 1833 he wrote to his brother that he had fought fourteen duels since Michaelmas and only once been wounded.⁸ Significantly, too, he accumulated a heavy burden of debt, which his father was soon disinclined to alleviate⁹ and which oppressed him for some years after he left university.

Bismarck’s education brought...