Otto von Bismarck had a difficult relationship with his father. All parents embarrass children but Ferdinand’s ineffectual, kindly incompetence did more than embarrass his brilliant son. In February of 1847, a month after his engagement to Johanna von Puttkamer, he wrote her a revealing letter about his parents:
I really loved my father. When not with him I felt remorse concerning my conduct toward him and made resolutions that I was unable to keep for the most part. How often did I repay his truly boundless, unselfish, good-natured tenderness for me with coldness and bad grace? Even more frequently I made a pretence of loving him, not wanting to violate my own code of propriety, when inwardly I felt hard and unloving because of his apparent weakness. I was not in a position to pass judgement on those weaknesses, which annoyed me only when coupled with gaucherie. And yet I cannot deny that I really loved him in my heart. I wanted to show you how much it oppresses me when I think about it.8
In the same letter, he describes his mother:
My mother was a beautiful woman, who loved external elegance, who possessed a bright, lively intelligence, but little of what the Berliner calls Gemüth [untranslatable but ‘warm heart’ might do.—JS]. She wished that I should learn much and become much, and it often appeared to me that she was hard and cold. As a small child I hated her; later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods. One only learns the value of the mother for the child when it is too late, when she is dead. The most modest maternal love, even when mixed with much selfishness, is still enormous compared with the love of the child.9
Wilhelmine Mencken, Bismarck’s mother, came from a very different world from that of the eccentric rural squire, Ferdinand von Bismarck. Born in Berlin in 1789 her family had great prospects. Wilhelmine’s father, Royal Cabinet Councilor Anastasius Ludwig Mencken (1752–1801), was the son of a cultivated professorial family in Helmstedt in the Duchy of Brunswick. Young Anastasius Ludwig ran away from home to Berlin to escape the family pressure to become a lawyer or professor in the tiny state of his birth. Mencken was so literate, charming, and quick that, though he was without family connections at court or money, he became a diplomat and rose by sheer ability to the rank of cabinet secretary in 1782 under Frederick the Great at the age of 30. He married a wealthy widow, wrote essays, and corresponded with leading figures of the Berlin enlightenment.10 Under Frederick William II he continued his diplomatic career, and gained a reputation as ‘intellectually the most important’ of the Cabinet Councillors.11 An unfortunate publication in 1792 suggested to his enemies that he was a ‘Jacobin’, that is, a supporter of the French Revolution. The King dismissed him. Since he had his wife’s comfortable fortune, he devoted himself to philosophy and political theory as a leading member of a Berlin circle of reform-minded bureaucrats and writers, who hoped for better things under the Crown Prince.
Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832) who later served as Metternich’s closest adviser, now turned his ambitious eyes on Mencken. Klaus Epstein describes young Gentz:
He was determined to ‘crash’ the narrow circle of the aristocracy by the force of his brilliance and personal charm, and he was unburdened by middle-class scruples in such matters as money or sex. His ability made him the greatest German political pamphleteer of his age; his connections allowed him to become ‘the secretary of Europe’ at the time of the Congress of Vienna.12
Gentz wrote extravagant love letters which are full of tears and imitations of Goethe’s young Werther but without the slightest intention to commit suicide. He frequented the salons of Berlin and practised what Sweet calls his ‘Parlour Technique’. In 1788 he met the brilliant young philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who said in 1788, ‘Gentz is a windbag who pays court to every woman.’13 Gentz had by now become what Sweet describes as ‘an erratic brilliant egoist with a greater capacity for loyalty to ideas than to people’.14 His judgement on how to climb the greasy pole we can trust and he saw in 1795 that Anastasius Ludwig Mencken had a bright future. Mencken represented the rule of the enlightened bureaucracy, which came to be known as the ‘cabinet party’. So Gentz in his ruthless way cultivated Anastasius Ludwig Mencken, the most important figure in the ‘cabinet party’. Gentz hoped that Mencken would reward him when the old King died.15 The calculation came off in 1797. The new King Frederick William III named Mencken on the third day of his reign to the top civil administrative post, which involved, according to Gentz, ‘direction of all civil affairs only on terms which reflect everlasting honor upon him and on the King’.16 In November 1797 Gentz wrote an open letter to the new King on the programme of reform. The King read it out to the court. As Gentz wrote to his friend Böttiger: ‘This small and unworthy production has made a sensation among all classes and has brought me actually one of the pleasantest experiences of my life.’17
When in 1797 Frederick William III made Mencken his Cabinet Chief, he became responsible for all petitions to the King. Like the White House chief of staff, Mencken filtered requests and his daily notebook listed them, as ‘refused’ or ‘rejected’. As Engelberg writes:
On the treadmill of bureaucratic work as a royal servant and cabinet chief, a discrepancy opened between the thinker occupied with humanity, enlightenment declarations made in his free hours and the official rigours of daily work with its decisions. A civil service mentality developed very early.18
At some point in these years Anastasius Ludwig Mencken wrote out his personal credo as a civil servant, which shows us what a remarkable figure he was:
I have never crawled, nor thrown myself away. In consideration of my political position I have only seen myself as a passenger on a long sea journey. He will take care to avoid swearing with the sailors, or drinking with the passengers, and pointing out to the conceited helmsman his incompetence, which would only earn him crude insults. He has to learn how to adjust his movement to the rolling of the craft, otherwise he will fall and excite much Schadenfreude. I have paid great attention to this and have not fallen. Had I fallen I would not have rejected the hand of him who had tripped me in order to pick me up, but that hand I would never have kissed.19
In a few months, however, the brilliant and independent royal adviser fell ill, and though only 46, would not last long. On 1 February 1798 Friedrich Gentz wrote to a friend:
Mencken now directs all internal administration. Since he is now extremely sunken and will certainly be torn from us all too soon, you will readily see how much enticement such a career offers to an active, ambitious and self-confident man.
Gentz had to decide whether to stay in post and hope that his fame, charm, and ‘parlour skills’ would end by earning him Mencken’s post or to try something else. He decided not to remain:
I am not made for banging away at cabals. I have a fear of the military which is not to be subdued, and if the king should put his entire trust in me today, I should certainly go to pieces in less than half a year.20
Anastasius Ludwig Mencken died on 5 August 1801, not yet 50 years old. Freiherr vom Stein, who knew him and used many of his position papers and unfulfilled reform schemes for his own programme in 1807, described his predecessor in glowing terms: ‘liberal in thought, cultivated, refined in sentiment, a benevolent man of the noblest caste of mind and views.’21 Mencken, an excellent, gifted and charming senior civil servant, died on the threshold of a great career. He stood at the very apex of power under a young insecure King who preferred to delegate matters rather than to pretend to be Frederick the Great. If Mencken had lived?
Had he lived, Wilhelmine, his younger child and only daughter, would never have married so undistinguished a person as Ferdinand von Bismarck. Engelberg argues that
Ferdinand von Bismarck contracted no misalliance by marrying Louise Wilhelmine Mencken but a social symbiosis. The country gentleman who at Schoenhausen was only a Lieutenant (ret.) won greater social prestige by this marriage.22
That cannot be right. In Jane Austen’s county society in 1800 or Wilhelmine Mencken’s Berlin, a young woman with not enough money
had little choice. As Hedwig von Bismarck drily observed, Wilhelmine ‘lacked the “von” before her name or money in her purse’ and could, of course, not go to court.23 Thus a very intelligent and beautiful 17-year-old girl married a dull country gentleman eighteen years her senior. It was not a recipe for either a happy marriage nor for a contented life as mother and home-maker. And Wilhelmine Mencken had neither. An acquaintance of Bismarck’s mother, who lived to a great age, Frau Charlotte von Quast Radensleben told Philipp zu Eulenburg years later what kind of person Wilhelmine Mencken became:
[she] adopted a curiously serious expression when she spoke about his mother. She shook her fine old head and said, ‘Not a pleasant woman, very smart but—very cold’.24
A child who loses a parent at an early age—and Wilhelmine was 12 when Anastasius died—never recovers completely. Though no evidence survives, she must have mourned her brilliant, successful father for the rest of her life and for the glamorous life that died with him. We can see that she wanted her sons to fill that void. Here is how she expressed it to Bismarck’s older brother Bernhard in 1830, poor decent Bernhard, a chip off his father’s block:
I imagined that my greatest good fortune would be to have a grown son, who, educated under my very eyes, would agree with me, but as a man would be called to penetrate deeper into the world of the intellect than I as a woman could do. I rejoiced in the thought of the intellectual exchange, the mutual encouragement for mental and spiritual engagement, and of that satisfying feeling to have such pleasures with a person who would be through the bonds of nature nearest to my heart, and who, still more, through the kinship of the spirit, would draw ever closer to me. The time for these hopes to be fulfilled has arrived but they have disappeared and unfortunately, I must confess, for ever.25
Not a nice letter to get from your mother. We don’t know how Bernhard felt but we know that Otto ‘hated’ her. He blamed her for sending him to the Plamann Anstalt, even though it had a very good reputation and had its inspiration in the gymnastic doctrines of Turnen, made famous by Turnvater Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852). He told the story of his awful six years there again and again to von Keudell, to Lucius von Ballhausen, and repeated it in old age in his memoirs. There are many versions. Here is the one that Otto Pflanze quotes:
At the age of six I entered a school whose teachers were demagogic Turner who hated the nobility and educated with blows and cuffs instead of words and reproofs. In the morning the children were awakened with rapier blows that left bruises, because it was too burdensome for the teachers to do it any other way. Gymnastics were supposed to be recreation, but during this too the teachers struck us with iron rapiers. For my cultivated mother, child rearing was too inconvenient and she freed herself of it very early, at least in her feelings.
And even the food was awful: ‘meat of a chewy kind, not exactly hard but impossible for the teeth to soften.’26
Bismarck loved his ‘weak’ father and hated his ‘strong’ mother. Otto Pflanze speculates that
Some of Bismarck’s habits and attitudes in later years may have stemmed from these early experiences: his contempt for men dominated by wives; his dislike of intellectuals (‘professor’ was for him an epithet); his hostility towards bureaucratic government and suspicion of Geheimräte (his maternal grandfather’s career); his late rising (pupils at the Plamann Anstalt were driven out of bed at 6.00 a.m.); his longing for the country and dislike of cities, especially Berlin; and his preference in agriculture for forestry (he never forgave his mother for ordering a stand of oak trees felled at Kniephof).27
The evidence about Bismarck’s life that I have seen certainly supports Pflanze’s suggestions. Pflanze had become a committed Freudian the longer he worked on Bismarck and used the oedipal mechanism very effectively to explain Bismarck’s growing hypochondria, gluttony, rage, and despair. That Bismarck’s health, temper, and emotional life deteriorated the more successful he became has been one of the most striking findings of my research on his career. His vices grew more vicious; his virtues less effective the longer he exercised the sovereignty of his powerful self. That self had been shaped, possibly deeply damaged in childhood. The death of the father for a girl like his mother or the coldness or absence of a mother for a male child like Bismarck inflicted permanent psychic wounds on both figures. Wilhelmine Mencken suffered from hypochondria like her son, had sensitive ‘nerves’, and needed to go away for long periods to take cures at fashionable spas. Her son’s hyphochondria was as gargantuan as his appetite. What are we to make of the fact that Bismarck confessed that ‘as a small child I hated her; later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods’ or that he urged Bernhard to do the same: ‘Don’t write too crudely to the parents. The Kniephof establishment is more susceptible to lies and diplomacy than to soldierly coarseness’?28 How had she frightened the child so thoroughly that he dared not tell her the truth? We do not know.
By an uncanny set of circumstances, Bismarck ended up in a kind of permanent parental triangle with his sovereigns, not just once but twice. He saw William I of Prussia as a kindly but weak man and his Queen and later Empress Augusta as an all-powerful, devious, and malevolent figure. Nor were these feelings concealed. Here is an example which Lady Emily Russell, the wife of the British Ambassador in Berlin, passed on to Queen Victoria on 15 March 1873. She reported to the Queen the ‘exceptional favour conferred upon us’ when the Emperor and Empress had dined at the British Embassy, which was a
high distinction which no other Embassy has ever yet enjoyed in Berlin … Your Majesty is aware of the political jealousy of Prince Bismarck about the Empress Augusta’s influence over the Emperor, which he thinks stands in the way of his anti-clerical and National policy, and prevents the formation of responsible ministries as in England. The Empress told my husband he [Bismarck] has only twice spoken to Her Majesty since the war, and she expressed a wish that he should dine with us also. According to etiquette he would have had to sit on the left side of the Empress, and Her Majesty would then have had an hour in which he could not have escaped conversing. Prince Bismarck accepted our invitation but said he would prefer to set aside etiquette, and cede the ‘pas’ to the Austrian Ambassador. However, on the day of the dinner and a short time before the hour appointed, Prince Bismarck sent an excuse saying he was ill with lumbago. The diplomatists look mysterious and hint at his illness being a diplomatic one. Prince Bismarck often expresses his hatred for the Empress in such strong language that my husband is placed in a very difficult position.29
The other royal triangle evoked in Bismarck even more violent feelings of hatred. Bismarck repeated over and over that Victoria Crown Princess of Prussia ruled her husband, the Crown Prince Frederick, and, if I am right about the Crown Prince’s state of depression, the rumours may well have been right. On 1 April 1888, a few weeks after the death of Kaiser William I and the succession of the Emperor Frederick and his Empress Victoria, Baroness Spitzemberg
threw on my finery and went with the children to wish the Princess B good luck … My dear Prince who had greeted me, ‘Ah, dear Spitzchen, what are you doing?’ took me to the table. To my right sat old Külzer. I ‘interviewed’ [English in original—JS] the Prince impudently … [Bismarck said] ‘My old Master was aware of his dependence. He used to say, ‘help me, you know how hen-pecked I am’, and so we operated together. For that this one [Frederick—JS] is too proud but he is dependent and submissive to an extent that is not to be believed, like a dog. The painful thing is that one has to remain in spite of it perfectly polite instead of intervening with a ‘damn it all!’ This battle wears me down and the Emperor. He is a brave soldier but on the other hand he is like those old moustached sergeants whom I have seen creep into their mouse-holes in fear of their wives … The worst was … ‘Vicky’. She was ‘a wild woman’. When he saw her pictures, she terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality, which speaks through her eyes. She had fallen in love with the Battenberger and wants him near her, like her mother, whom
the English call ‘the selfish old beast’ [English in the original—JS] holds onto her brothers, with who knows what sort of incestuous thoughts.30
This disgusting, misogynist, and prurient outburst can hardly be called ‘normal’. It and the many other examples, which clutter Bismarck’s conversation, would make interesting material for a Freudian case study. Bismarck was physically ill more and more of the time as he aged. Its causes were certainly as much psychic as physical. I believe that when Bismarck said to Hildegard Spitzemberg, ‘this constant resistance and the constant punch bag existence wears me down’, he meant it and he was right. For twenty-six years, he found himself in the position of the desperate and furious son in a parental triangle, in which the ‘parents’—the Emperor and Empress—had in fact literally absolute power over him. The Emperor could dismiss Bismarck at any moment but the old Emperor never did, the younger Emperor Frederick, was too ill to do it, and the youngest, Kaiser William II, with whom Bismarck could only pose as grandfather, very quickly did. Is it not also possible that Bismarck skilfully exploited the royal triangle by playing the ‘weak’ father off against the ‘strong’ mother? And that some element of ‘personal dictatorship’ emerged out of his deep ambivalences about his own parents?
Bismarck: A Life Page 5
