Bismarck: A Life Read online

  BISMARCK

  A LIFE

  JONATHAN STEINBERG

  Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

  Oxford University’s objective of excellence

  in research, scholarship, and education.

  Oxford New York

  Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

  Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

  New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

  With offices in

  Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

  Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

  South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

  Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Steinberg

  Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  www.oup.com

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

  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

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  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, a
nd 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