When I began the work on this biography, I saw Bismarck’s constant resignation threats, his long stays away from Berlin, his illnesses and hypochondria as in part ingenious tactics to get his way and they were undoubtedly that too. Now I see more clearly that the psychic triangle between a ‘weak’ emperor and a ‘strong’ empress must have given Bismarck constant pain as if his political fate required that a wounded psychic muscle be twisted again and again to a point beyond endurance. When Dr Ernst Schweninger arrived in 1884, Bismarck’s gluttony, physical symptoms, and chronic sleeplessness were about to kill him. Schweninger treated the Iron Chancellor by wrapping him completely in warm, damp towels and by holding his hand until he fell asleep. Is it fanciful to see that as a surrogate for the warmth of a loving mother?
In 1816 the Bismarck family moved to the Pomeranian estate of Kniephof, which Ferdinand had inherited from the distant relative we mentioned above. It was a bigger estate but had a less developed village and was further from Berlin. During the 1820s Ferdinand transformed the economic basis of his estates from cereal to cattle. Bismarck always preferred the woods of Pomerania to the flood plains of Schönhausen.31 The child Bismarck loved Kniephof and, as he told von Keudell on a journey to Leipzig in 1864:
up to the age of six I was always in the fresh air or in the stables. An old cowherd warned me once not to creep around under the cows so trustingly. The cow, he said, can tread on your eye. The cow notices nothing and goes on chewing, but the eye is then gone. I have often thought about that later when people, without noticing it, do harm to others.32
At 6 he went to the Plamann Institute and suffered for another six years. From there, on 27 April 1821, we have the first written testimony (I cannot reproduce the quaint spelling) but the quality of the prose attests to the standards of the Institute. Not many 6-year-olds would be able to write this:
Dear Mother, I have happily arrived marks have been given out and I hope you will be pleased. A new springer has come who can do tricks on horseback and on foot. Many, many greetings and so stay as well as you were when we left you. I am your loving son Otto.33
The second piece of Bismarckian prose from Easter 1825 shows how much progress the young scholar had made in four years:
Dear Mother,
I am very healthy. There will now be as every year promotions. I have been put in the second class in sums, in natural history, in geography, in German, in singing, writing and drawing and in gym. Send us quickly a plant drum so that when we go out to collect plants, we can put them in it. The strict teacher has gone away and a new teacher named Kayser has come. Also one student has gone. The new course has begun. Mr and Mrs Plamann are well. Be well and write soon and greet everybody from your true son Otto.34
In 1827 Bismarck’s life improved. At the age of 12 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. From 1830 to 1832, he moved to the Grey Cloister Gymnasium also in Berlin; I cannot say why he moved schools but his final school report contained the rubric diligence: ‘sometimes irregular, school attendance lacked the constant and expected regularity’.35 He and his brother lived in the family’s townhouse at 53 Behrendstrasse in winter with their parents, and in the summer on their own with a housekeeper and a household schoolmaster.
In July 1829 when the two brothers were separated, Otto wrote Bernhard the following letter from Kniephof and, even if I allow for the fact that the writer is only 14, the tone and the vividness of the prose mark the debut of one of the best letter writers of the nineteenth century:
Tuesday we had a big crowd here. His Excellency the Sack (the Provincial President), the bank man Rumschüttel (who did nothing but taste wine), Colonel Einhart and so were here. Little Malwine [Bismarck’s young sister—JS] begins to look quite personable and speaks German and French, whichever occurs to her … She still remembers you very well and says over and over ‘Do Bennat also come’. She was really pleased when I arrived. They are building a lot in the distillery and they are adding a new house with cellars, the former stable will be a dwelling. The day labourers will move to the sheep pen and where they live now.
Carl will get a house. I have worked a terrible amount. In Zimmerhausen, I shot a duck.36
The following summer, Otto wrote Bernhard about a rural comedy in Kniephof:
On Friday three promising young fellows, an arsonist, a highwayman and a thief, escaped from the local jail. The whole neighbourhood swarmed with patrols, gendarmes and militia. People feared for their lives. In the evening the Kniephof Imperial Execution Force, which consisted of 25 militia-men, marched forth against the three monsters, armed as well they could with muskets, flints, pistols, and the rest with forks and scythes. Every crossing point over the Zampel was occupied. Our military men were paralysed with fear. If two units met, they called out, but they were so terrified that the others did not reply. The first unit ran where they could and the other crept behind the bushes.37
Needless to say, the ‘promising young fellows’ were not caught.
On 15 April 1832 Bismarck got his abitur, the prized higher school certificate, which entitled the bearer to enroll at a university. On 10 May 1832 Bismarck matriculated at Göttingen ‘studiosus of the laws and science of statecraft’.38 The Georgia Augusta University of Göttingen had been founded in 1734 under George II, Elector of Hanover and King of England, and rapidly became the centre of the ‘English Enlightenment’ on the continent. Göttingen would not be on first glance the ideal university for a young Junker like Otto von Bismarck, but there were other attractions as Margaret Lavinia Anderson explains: ‘What gave Göttingen life its peculiar character was the dominance of the aristocracy. … the promenades of Göttingen were bright with self-styled romantic heroes, conspicuous in velvet frock coats, rings and spurs, flowing locks and long moustaches, and accompanied by the inevitable pair of bulldogs.’39
Göttingen may have attracted Bismarck for that reason, but John Lothrop Motley, a gifted upper-class Bostonian, came for the learning associated with it and found it wanting. In 1832 he wrote home to Boston:
at all events it is not worth one’s while to remain long in Göttingen, because most of the professors who were ornaments of the university are dead or decayed, and the town itself is excessively dull.40
Motley shared the same birthday as Bismarck but was a year older. Like his friend he came from a social class in which one knew everybody. He corresponded for years with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., knew Emerson and Thoreau, and, because of those connections, became US Ambassador in Vienna and later in London without ever having had any serious diplomatic preparation. A gifted linguist, he spoke perfect German, learned Dutch, and wrote a monumental multi-volume history of the Dutch Republic for which he became famous in his lifetime. It had become fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s for upper-class Americans like Motley and well-placed young Englishmen to spend a few years in German universities, which had begun to exercise a powerful attraction on advanced opinion. The great William Whewell, mathematician, philosopher, and long-time Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, learned about Naturwissenschaft (natural sciences) and the new type of serious university in Germany and tried to push Cambridge to imitate it. Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians describes the Tractarian the Revd Edward Pusey, friend of Newman and Keble, as a man of wealth and learning, a professor and a canon of Christ Church, ‘who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany’.41 Strachey plays here on the contrast between staid Oxford clergymen of the proper sort in the late 1820s and 1830 and uppity young men like Pusey ‘who had been to Germany’ and came back full of the new theology and Bible criticism.
Motley had no such aspirations but he did do something remarkable; he wrote a novel about life in a German university. The American National Biography Online dismisses it in a sentence: ‘Motley’s first novel, Morton’s Hope, a historical romance, also appeared in 1839. The little critical attention it received was negative: it was condemned for its flawed plot, diction, and characterization.’ I agree that Morton’s Hope ha
s its limits but it has one precious virtue, Otto von Bismarck, thinly disguised as Otto von Rabenmarck, plays the main role. Here we have a remarkable portrait of Bismarck as a student and of the place where he studied.
Motley first met Bismarck as a 17-year-old freshman along with fellow students from Göttingen, who had begun ‘eine Bierreise’, a beer-drinking trip, the object of which was to get ‘smashed’ in as many German cities as possible. Here is the picture Motley/Morton gives us:
Rabenmark was a ‘fox’ (the slang term for a student in his first year), who had been just challenging the veteran student to drink. He was very young, even for a fox, for at the time I write of, he was not yet quite seventeen, but in precocity of character, in every respect, he went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known … His figure was slender, and not yet mature but already of a tolerable height. His dress was in the extreme of the then Göttingen fashion. He wore a chaotic coat without collar or buttons, and as destitute of colour as of shape; enormously wide trousers and boots with iron heels and portentous spurs. His shirt-collar, unconscious of cravat, was doubled over his shoulders and his hair hung down about his ears and neck. A faint attempt at moustachios, of an indefinite colour, completed the equipment of his face, and a huge saber strapped around his waist, that of his habiliment. As he wrote Von before his name, and was descended of a Bohemian family, who had been baronized before Charlemagne’s time, he wore an enormous seal-ring on his fore-finger with his armorial bearing. Such was Otto von Rabenmark, a youth who in a more fortunate sphere would have won himself name and fame. He was gifted with talents and acquirements immeasurably beyond his years.42
Even then young Bismarck stood out. Several months later, Motley took a walk through the city and reported that
all along the street, I saw, on looking up, the heads and shoulders of students projecting from every window. They were arrayed in tawdry smoking caps, and heterogeneous-looking dressing gowns with the long pipes and flash tassels depending from their mouths.43
Motley/Morton then ran into Rabenmark walking his dog, Ariel. Both man and dog are dressed outlandishly and, when a group of four students laugh, von Rabenmark challenges three of them to duels and the fourth who insulted the dog is forced to jump over Rabenmark’s stick like a dog. They go back to Bismarck’s rooms. Morton notes the plain furniture and that ‘the floor was without carpet and sanded’. The walls were covered with silhouettes:
a peculiar and invariable characteristic of a German student’s room;—they are well executed profiles, in black paper on a white ground, of the occupant’s intimate friends, and are usually four or five inches square, and surrounded with a narrow frame of black wood. Rabenmarks’s friends seemed to be numerous, for there were at least a hundred silhouettes, ranged in regular rows gradually decreasing by one from the bottom, till the pyramid was terminated by a single one, which was the profile of the ‘senior’ of the Pomeranian club … The third side of the room was decorated with a couple of ‘schlägers’ or duelling swords, which were fastened cross-wise against the wall.44
‘There’, said Rabenmark, entering the room, unbuckling his belt, and throwing the pistols and schläger on the floor. ‘I can leave my buffoonery for a while and be reasonable. It’s rather tiresome work, this renommiring [gaining reputation or renommée—JS] … I am a fox. When I came to the university three months ago, I had not a single acquaintance. I wished to introduce myself into the best Landsmannschaft [a duelling society—JS], but I saw little chance of succeeding. I have already, however, become an influential member. What course do you suppose I adopted to gain my admission?’
‘I suppose you made friends of the president or senior, as you call him, and other magnates of the club.’ Said I.
‘No, I insulted them all publicly and in the grossest possible manner … and after I had cut off the senior’s nose, sliced off the con-senior’s upper lip, moustachios and all, besides bestowing less severe marks of affection on the others, the whole club in admiration of my prowess and desiring to secure the services of so valorous a combatant voted me in by acclamation … I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life. You see I am a very rational sort of person now and you would hardly take me for the crazy mountebank you met in the street half-an hour ago. But then I see that this is the way to obtain superiority. I determined at once on arriving at the university, that to obtain mastery over my competitors, who were all, extravagant, savage, eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant and savage as any one else …’ His age was, at the time of which I am writing, exactly eighteen and a half.45
Erich Marcks, who in 1915 published the first full biography of Bismarck which used interviews with the living Bismarck seems to have been one of the few German biographers actually to have read Morton’s Hope. He concluded that ‘out of the features of the Göttingen student Rabenmark, Bismarck stands out with unmistakable accuracy; his experience, his appearance, his way of speaking shimmer through’.46 Marcks also reports that Bismarck in three semesters engaged in twenty-five duels.47 Yet the really interesting fact about Morton’s Hope escapes Marcks. He thinks only of Bismarck, not of Motley. How remarkable both men must have been, the one to inspire, and the other to write, a biography or a biographical novel about the young man. Even at 18 Bismarck had a special aura. Motley makes it absolutely clear that this young man ‘in precocity of character, in every respect, … went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known.’ Motley saw another important attribute in his friend, he saw ‘a very rational sort of person … I see that this is the way to obtain superiority and that I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.’ Bismarck’s urge to rule and dominate others by the force of his personality stood out even at the age of 18. Later in his political career he chose conflict over compromise in most situations, as if conflict had a cleansing or clarifying property by drawing the lines between friends and foes more sharply or defining the possible courses of action.
At Göttingen Bismarck clashed with authority very often. Göttingen, like Cambridge in the nineteenth century, had its own courts and applied Karzerstrafe (jail sentences) in the university jail to unruly students who had been caught by the Pedells (in Cambridge they were and still are known as the ‘Bull Dogs’).48 Bismarck naturally got into trouble and had to serve a sentence. How literally such incarceration was taken I cannot say but we know that he wrote to the Rector of Göttingen in the spring of 1833:
Your Magnificence had the goodness to postpone the Karzerstrafe imposed on me until after my return from the Michaelmas holiday. Now a further recurrence of my illness, the end of which is not foreseeable, requires me to remain in Berlin and continue my studies here since such a long journey would further weaken my already weakened constitution. For this reason I beg Your Magnificence most obediently to allow me to serve my sentence here and not in Gottingen. Your Magnificence’s most obedient Otto von Bismarck, stud. jur.49
We know quite a lot about Bismarck’s state of mind and plans through a series of lively letters he wrote to his ‘Corps Brother’ (the duelling fraternity ‘Pomerania’) Gustav Scharlach (1811–81). The first touches a familiar undergraduate problem but does it with Bismarck’s literary extravagance:
There have been uncomfortable scenes with the Old Man, who absolutely refuses to pay my debts. This puts me into a misanthropic mood … The deficit is not so bad because I have huge credit, which allows me to live in a slovenly way. The consequence is that I look sick and pale which the Old Man will, of course, ascribe, when I go home for Christmas, to a lack of means of subsistence; then I will make a scene and say to him I would rather be a Mohammedan than suffer hunger any longer, and that will solve the problem.50
The next letter has become justly famous for its wit, style, and brilliant caricature. Bismarck describes to Scharlach what will happen to him if he opts not to go into the bureaucracy but to go home to run one of his father’s estates. If Scharlach visits him in ten years
he will find
a well-fed Landwehr [militia—JS] officer with a moustache, who curses and swears a justifiable hatred of Frenchmen and Jews until the earth trembles, and beats his dogs and his servants in the most brutal fashion, even if he is tyrannized by his wife. I will wear leather trousers and allow myself to be ridiculed at the Wool Market in Stettin, and when anyone calls me Herr Baron, I’ll stroke my moustache in good humour and sell two dollars cheaper. On the King’s birthday I’ll get drunk and shout ‘Vivat!’ and in general get excited a lot and my every word will be ‘on my honour!’ and ‘a superb horse!’. In short I shall be happy in my family’s rural circle, car tel est mon plaisir.51
The vignette of the typical Junker country squire is a perfect miniature, dashed off in a letter to a friend and has justly become famous. The writer at that time had a week earlier celebrated his nineteenth birthday. When Bismarck opted for politics, German literature lost a fine comic novelist.
The third in this set of letters to Scharlach explains his career plans and dates from early May 1834. In it he announces his intention to sit the state examinations and hence
to exchange the honourable estate of candidate in law with that of a royal civil servant, that is, Referendar at the Berlin Municipal Court. My plan is to stay here for a year, then go to the Provincial Government in Aachen; after the second year to sit the diplomatic examination and then to leave to the grace of destiny which will render me utterly indifferent whether one sends me to Petersburg or Rio Janeiro … You will, alas, find in this letter my old habit of talking a lot about myself. Do me the pleasure of imitating this and fear not for that reason the slightest shadow of vanity.52
At this time, a chance encounter changed his life. In the summer of 1834 he met Lieutenant Albrecht von Roon, a brilliant young officer and graduate of the prestigious Kriegsakademie (the Prussian War College). When the General Staff finally became fully operational in the 1820s, it developed an elaborate project to survey and make maps of the terrain of the Kingdom of Prussia, a tradition, which continued to the Second World War. (The University Library at Cambridge has a complete pristine set of thousands of Wehrmacht maps, so detailed that it is possible to locate landmarks necessary for operations by squads or platoons.) The topography section of the General Staff employed gifted young officers too poor to pay for their own horses and equipment and hence unfitted for immediate assignment to regiments as general staff officers. By an interesting irony, the two generals—Moltke and Roon—who marched in triumph on either side of Bismarck in the parade down Unter den Linden of June 1871 to mark the victory over France and the unification of Germany, had both spent important years in the topographical unit. Arden Bucholz notes that, like Roon, Moltke took part in the great topographic project under Chief of the Great General Staff Karl Freiherr von Müffling.
Bismarck: A Life Page 6
