Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Land ceases to be identity and becomes a commodity. The gainers are the Jews:

  The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.16

  This is eerily accurate. The next generation of nobility in fact included, as Burke foresaw, a Freiherr von Oppenheim, several varieties of Lord and Baron Rothschild, the von Bleichröders, the von Mendelssohns, and so on. For Burke Jews represented everything tawdry and commercial about markets:

  Jew brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.17

  Burke’s best pupils and most avid readers were reactionary Prussian landlords and enemies of ‘progress’ in every country. After all, the old ruling classes in Europe 1790 were landowners and feudal lords. Their hatred of free markets, free citizens, free peasants, free movement of capital and labour, free thought, Jews, stock markets, banks, cities, and a free press continued to 1933 and helped to bring about the Nazi dictatorship. It was, after all, a group of Junker conspirators led by Franz von Papen (1879–1969), a Westfalian Catholic nobleman, who persuaded the Junker President of the Weimar Republic, Field Marshall Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg (1847–1934), to appoint Adolf Hitler to Bismarck’s old job. The Junkers intended to use the Austrian corporal for their ends, but he used them for his.

  Burke, the classical liberal, was now the prophet of reaction, the perfect example of his own law of unintended consequences. There is yet a further irony. The means by which Burke reached his new Prussian readers involved one of the most brilliant con-men of the early nineteenth century, a young intellectual called Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832). Gentz plays a double part in the life of Bismarck. He translated Burke into German but he gives us an important insight into the career of Anastasius Ludwig Mencken (1752–1801), Bismarck’s maternal grandfather. Gentz ended up as the most important counsellor to the reactionary Prince Metternich who in Vienna on the day of Bismarck’s birth, was presiding over the Congress of the same name.

  When the French Revolution broke out, young Gentz perked up. On 5 March 1790, he wrote:

  The spirit of the age stirs strongly and vigorously in me; it is high time for mankind to awaken from its long sleep. I am young, and the universal striving after freedom, which breaks forth on all sides, inspires in me sympathy and warmth.18

  Gentz took up and shed principles with the perfect insouciance of a true trickster. Initially he welcomed the French Revolution, as he wrote on 5 December 1790 to Christian Garve:

  The Revolution constitutes the first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example in the history of the world of the construction of government upon the principles of an orderly rational constructed system. It constitutes the hope of mankind and provides consolation to men elsewhere who continue to groan under the weight of age-old evils.19

  He even read Burke when it first came out in English but disliked it. He was ‘opposed to its fundamental principles and conclusions’. Gentz always had an eye for the main chance. He changed his mind in 1792 after the mob violence in Paris and especially when he saw that Reflections on the Revolution in France had been a huge publishing success. Within six months, 19,000 copies of the English edition had been sold. By September 1791 it had gone through eleven printings. Gentz decided to translate the book into German and it too became a success in the German-speaking lands. Thus Edmund Burke, the prophet of the new conservatism, had the good fortune to be translated by ‘the greatest German political pamphleteer of his age’. He wrote to a friend that he translated Burke ‘not because it was a revolutionary book in the history of political thought, but because it was a magnificently eloquent tirade against the course of events in France’.20

  He wrote the introduction in December 1792 and sent a copy dedicated to the Emperor in Vienna but got no response. On 23 December 1792 Gentz decided to dedicate his Burke to Frederick William II, who accepted it and promoted him to Kriegsrat (military councillor).21 The book became a best-seller. Two further editions and dozens of offprints poured onto the market.22 Here is a paragraph from the preface to his translation, which shows how far Gentz had moved from his initial approval of the French Revolution:

  The despotic synod of Paris, internally supported by Inquisition courts, externally by thousands of volunteer missionaries, declares with an intolerance of which since the collapse of the infallibility of the popes no such example has been given, every deviation from its maxims heresy and horror … From now on there shall be one Reich, one People, one Faith and one language. No epoch in history, either ancient or recent, offers a picture of a more dangerous crisis.23

  This remarkable paragraph deserves a moment of awe. In the winter of 1792–3, a 30-year-old clerk in the Prussian administration under Frederick William II described a potential legacy of the French Revolution that not even Burke could have imagined. One day a distorted and hideous travesty of French revolutionary terror and intimidation would arise in the very city in which he wrote those words, Berlin, and under Adolph Hitler it would proclaim ‘one Reich, one People, one Faith and one language’ in its Nazi version: ‘one Reich, one People, one Führer.’ Burke and Gentz together had created modern conservatism.

  Some years later Gentz got to know Alexander von der Marwitz (1787–1814), whom Ewald Frie describes as one ‘with all the signs of the brilliant romantic’.24 Alexander was the younger brother of Ludwig von der Marwitz (1777–1837) and with Ludwig von der Marwitz we meet the first Burkean defence of the Junker class and the articulation of the structural anti-Semitism which forms a continuous thread in Prussian and then German hatred of Jews. Jews are enemies of the Prussian state in precisely the sense that Burke described: they ‘volatalize’ property and represent the dominion of money over real value. Gentz found Alexander von der Marwitz, who happened to be ‘in love’ with his Jewish hostess, too dour for him and observed ‘for [my] gentle nerves too hard as with some people who really give you pain when they shake your hand’.25 The attractive young Junker belonged to the most enlightened circle in Berlin in the years before and after 1806.

  I have no proof that Alexander von der Marwitz actually carried Gentz’s translation of Burke to his brother but the identity of view between Burke and the older von der Marwitz cannot be entirely coincidental. We know from Ewald Frie’s moving biography of Ludwig that the brothers corresponded regularly and were close, though utterly different in temperament. If Gentz found Alexander too hard, Alexander described his older brother in a letter from 19 December 1811 as a man ‘whose good traits and great abilities have been turned into stone’.26 Here is the older von der Marwitz on Stein’s reforms:

  These were the traitors and Stein was their chief. He began the revolutionizing of our fatherland; the war of the property-less and of industry against agriculture, of fluidity against stability, of crass materialism against divinely ordained institutions, of so-called utility against law, of the present against the past and the future, of the individual against the family, of the speculators and money-lenders against the land and the trades, of desk-bred theories against customs rooted in the country’s history, of book learning and self-styled talents against virtue and honourable character.27

  The argument is pure Burke and written with the same fury that drove the master’s pen in 1790. Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz (1777–1837) linked the world of Frederick the Great and that of Bismarck’s childhood. As a child von der Marwitz stood by the old King’s carriage as a court page. On 9 May 1811 Marwitz organized a revolt. In Frankfurt an der Oder he gathered the district assemblies of the nobles of Lebus, Beeskow, and Storkow from the south-east of the Märkisch-Oderland District in Brandenburg and they addressed a petition to his Majesty the King. It is worth quoting at some length because it reflects one type of Junker conservatism:

 
; In the decree in which the right to own land is granted to the Jews, the phrase reads ‘those who confess the mosaic religion’. These Jews, if they stay true to their faith, are enemies of every existing state and if they are no longer true to their faith they are hypocrites and have the mass of liquid capital in their hands. As soon, therefore, as the value of landownership has sunk to a point at which they can acquire it with profit, it will end in their hands. As landowners they will become the chief representatives of the state and so our old, venerable Brandenburg-Prussia will become a new-fangled Jewish state.28

  Marwitz uses the word Judenstaat almost certainly for the first time. A liberal state is a ‘Jew State’. The very phrase Theodor Herzl later used to found the Zionist movement appears in this attack on Jews as the bearers of capitalism, free markets, and access to landed property. The Weimar Republic was denounced as a ‘Jew republic’. This is the Junker reply to Adam Smith. Money and mobile property are Jewish. As von der Marwitz wrote later,

  They (Hardenberg’s entourage) had all studied Adam Smith but not realized that he speaks of money, because in such a thoroughly lawful county which has a living constitution, as England is, the study of money can be driven to the limits without overthrowing the constitution … 29

  As Ewald Frie writes,

  the Jew symbolized the incomprehensibility of post-feudal society, without history-modern, homeless, orientated to capital and profit, revolutionary … the sharply formulated anti-Judaism [is] at its core anti-modernity.30

  Carl August Freiherr von Hardenberg (1750–1822), State Chancellor of the King of Prussia, the addressee of Ludwig von der Marwitz’s Burkean effusion, was not amused. ‘Highly presumptious and shameless’, he wrote on the margin of von der Marwitz’s petition.31 In June 1811 he sent von der Marwitz and his elderly fellow rebel, Friedrich Ludwig Karl Count von Finckenstein, to Spandau prison. To von der Marwitz’s intense pain, none of his fellow great landlords lifted a finger to help him. They may have shared his views but not to the point of prison. We shall hear Bismarck and other Prussian aristocrats use exactly the same arguments against ‘Jewish’ liberalism that von der Marwitz used and, as for Scharnhorst’s hope that non-nobles would make careers in Prussian regiments, von der Marwitz dismissed it. The bourgeoisie cannot produce officers:

  Through the children of bankers, of business people, ideologues and ‘world citizens’ ninety-nine times out of a hundred the speculator or the counter clerk will shine through—the huckster’s spirit sticks to them, profit is always before their eyes, i.e. they are and remain common. The son of even the dumbest nobleman, if you will, will shy away from doing anything that could be considered common … And then much learning deadens the spirit.32

  Von der Marwitz cannot be equated with the entire Junker class though he saw himself as their spokesman, wrongly, as he found out. The Kingdom of Prussia had changed in ways that made his passionate defence of feudal rights obsolete. Market forces had changed minds as well as practices in the east Elbian great estates and new Prussian legislation plus the spread of new agricultural techniques promised many of them better economic conditions. Much of East Prussia remained ‘liberal’ the way the slave owners in the American South before 1860 preached liberalism. Exporters needed free access to foreign markets and hence supported free trade, representative institutions, especially if they controlled them, and freedom from the meddlesome state. They may have sympathized with the ideas of a von der Marwitz but they lived in the real world.

  In addition, Prussia had acquired a series of unwanted territories in the Rhine valley. It had very much preferred to absorb the whole of Saxony, nearer to hand and in 1815 much richer. Metternich who feared the growth of Prussian power, forced Frederick William III to accept a slice of northern Saxony and as compensation in the far west of the German lands, sleepy Catholic communities by quiet rivers like the Ruhr and the Wupper that ran through farmland. Nobody knew at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that beneath the farms and fields lay one of the great European coal seams. By what Hegel called ‘the slyness of reason’, the Austrian Chancellor had given Austria’s rival, the Kingdom of Prussia, the fuel for its future industrialization. He had also given them approximately 1,870,908 people in 1816,33 a population, which had grown to some 2.5 million by 1838.34 The region had some of the highest literacy rates in eighteenth-century Europe and by 1836 only 10.8 per cent of recruits drawn from the new Rhenish territories could not sign their names.35 The new territories, organized after 1822 into the Rhine Province, had a very high proportion of Roman Catholics. Brophy estimates that about 75 per cent of the population of the Rhine Province were Roman Catholic and the left bank of the Rhine, especially the area around Cologne, up to 95 per cent.36 They had also been occupied by the French for much longer than the eastern Prussia territories and had received and accepted the Napoleonic Code with its set of individual and property rights. The Code became part of the identity of the Rhine Province known as ‘Rhenish Law’. The area with its good communications and enterprising capitalists became the nursery of German railroads. By 1845 half of all railways in Germany were in the Rhine Province alone.37

  On 30 April 1815, another new Prussian province came into being. The territories and principalities between the Rhine and Weser now lost their independence for good and became the Prussian Province of Westphalia with a population of about 1 million.38 The prince-bishoprics of Fulda and Paderborn and the archdiocese of Münster ensured that in the new province as in the Rhine Province there would be a substantial Catholic population. As Friedrich Keinemann puts it, ‘Protestant civil servants in a Catholic environment’ represented the new Prussian royal authority.39 The inclusion of the two new provinces changed the political landscape of the Kingdom of Prussia during Bismarck’s lifetime. By 1874 roughly one-third of the population of the Kingdom were Catholic, according to official statistics.40 The western territories of the Kingdom had a more liberal political culture, Catholic sensibilities, commercial and increasingly industrial bourgeois elites, and in due course a different class of representatives in Prussian parliaments. The Junker elites no longer controlled ‘their’ kingdom as absolutely as they had. This too formed part of the Prussian legacy that Bismarck in a sense inherited.

  The Prussian legacy defined but never contained the aspirations of Otto von Bismarck. This legacy—the army inherited from the ‘genius-king’, Frederick the Great; the fusion of the Junker class with army and the bureaucracy; the pervasive idea of ‘Dienst’ or service, the rigid distinction between nobility and bourgeoisie; a military conception of honour; hatred of Jews—all these and more which we shall see in Bismarck’s own career, constitute the framework of ideas, behaviour, and values which Bismarck inherited. His genius enabled him to transform his own relationship to this inheritance and ultimately to mobilize the crown and the nobility in wars which he inspired and exploited. He used techniques of the French Revolution to frustrate its ends. In 1890 when he left office exactly a century after the explosion of French liberty, he had blocked the flow of liberalism and staunched the ‘providential’ doctrines of equality. He transmitted an authoritarian, Prussian, semi-absolute monarchy with its cult of force and reverence for the absolute ruler to the twentieth century. Hitler fished it out of the chaos of the Great Depression of 1929–33. He took Bismarck’s office, Chancellor, on 30 January 1933. Once again a ‘genius’ ruled Germany.

  3

  Bismarck: The ‘Mad Junker’

  On 6 July 1806 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck (1771–1845) married Wilhelmine Louise Mencken (1789–1839) in the Royal Palace and Garrison Church in Potsdam.1 Ferdinand von Bismarck, the youngest of four brothers, was ‘the least educated of them and richly indolent’.2 ‘Uncle Ferdinand’ had an amiable and unpretentious character. He was a kindly, decent, mildly eccentric, country squire, rather like Squire Allworthy in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. His son described life with his father in a letter to his sister in December of 1844, and noted how his father liked to organize e
laborate hunting excursions in deepest winter in minus 8 degrees Celsius temperature when nothing stirs and when nobody shoots a thing. His father had four thermometers and a barometer, which he would look at one after another, several times each day, tapping each to make sure they were working. Otto von Bismarck urged his sister to write about the small things of life which give their father real pleasure:

  whom you visit, what you have eaten, what the horses are doing, how the servants behave, whether the doors squeak and if the windows let in draughts, in short, real things, facta.3

  His niece Hedwig von Bismarck remembered ‘Uncle Ferdinand’ fondly: ‘he always had a friendly word for us or a cheerful joke especially when Otto and I rode on his knees … and he was often teased when reminded of the entry he wrote in a guest book of a hotel under the heading character: ‘beastly’. On hearing of the death of a distant relative through whom he gained the inheritance of the Pomeranian estates of Kniephof, Jarz, and Külz he remarked cheerfully, ‘a cold uncle served in estate sauce is a very acceptable dish.’4 Fielding’s squires, on the other hand, never controlled serf labour but Ferdinand von Bismarck did. On 15 March 1803 he issued a manorial order addressed ‘to my subjects’:

  I will here once again make known that in future I will hold all strictly accountable to the end that those who do not do their duty or deserve punishment may not excuse themselves by saying they did not know …5

  Like many Junkers he treated his estate as a little kingdom. He exercised a range of feudal powers and had a court on the estate in which he acted as judge and jury. As late as 1837 more than three million Prussian subjects lived under manorial courts of the kind that Ferdinand von Bismarck convened, 13.8 per cent of the total population of the Kingdom.6 He appointed pastors and schoolmasters on ‘his lands’ and expected nobody, not state officials nor neighbours, to intervene. Ferdinand von Bismarck and the gentry of Brandenburg constituted what Monica Wienfort describes as the ‘stronghold of conservative, feudal politics’.7 In the years of Bismarck’s childhood, the feudal rights of the landlords eroded irregularly but markedly. Many of the gentry defended such rights in the hope that the state would compensate them for their surrender, especially the right to convene manorial courts.