Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  The activity of the individual civil servant among us is very rarely independent, even that of the highest, and for the rest their activity confines itself to pushing the administrative machinery along the tracks already laid down. The Prussian civil servant resembles a player in an orchestra. He may be the first violin or play the triangle; without oversight or influence on the whole he must play his part, as it is set down, whether he think it good or bad. I will make music, which I consider good or none at all.86

  The reality of his debts continued to plague him. On 21 December 1838, he wrote a grovelling letter to his friend Savigny and apologized for not yet paying him back the

  sum that for years you have had a right to expect. In the next few days I will come to Berlin myself in the hope that I can do in person what I have not achieved in writing, that is, raise some money, which we both doubtless urgently need.87

  The year 1839 began badly. On New Year’s Day Wilhelmine Bismarck died just short of her fiftieth birthday. For the previous three years, his mother had been suffering with an undiagnosed growth, which got progressively worse in 1838. The sources are extraordinarily silent about the woman who so profoundly influenced his life. We can only speculate in a vacuum.

  At Easter 1839 Bismarck took up residence in Kniephof and became a full-time farmer. Kniephof was a large estate farmed by Instleute with contracts with the lord, a form of rural employment, which resembled the metayer in France, the mezzadro in Italy, or the ‘share cropper’ in the American south. In the Prussian case the abolition of bodily servitude, that is, serfdom, had transformed the relations between lord and land worker and in the 1830s and 1840s the ‘increasing commercialization of many regions … led to every more frequent demands about unpaid bills for sales or services’.88 The money economy was turning traditional contracts into relations of the market for labour. Instleute were not hired labour nor fully free of traditional ties either.89 Since 1800 Prussian agriculture had been in a process of increasing professionalization. Agricultural colleges of the kind that Bismarck attended in Greifswald spread, and productivity of agriculture had risen even against the trend of a long depression which followed the end of the Napoleonic wars and did not finish until the early 1850s. Pflanze provides useful figures on agricultural growth and productivity. The population of Prussia grew between 1816 and 1864 from 23,552,000 to 37,819,000 or by 59 per cent. The area under cultivation in the same period rose from 55.5 per cent of the land area to 69.3 per cent, an increase of 24.8 per cent but yield per acre increased by 135 per cent.90 Bismarck worked hard and began to get results. The trends were moving in his direction.

  Although his correspondence with his brother in these years concerns farming, Bismarck now moved into a world dominated by the old Pomeranian noble families, with names which were to play a central part in his career: Dewitz, Bülow, Thadden-Trieglaff, Blanckenburg, von der Osten, von der Marwitz, Wartensleben, Senfft von Pilsach, and others. Hartwin Spenkuch in his book on the Prussian House of Lords put the Pomeranian nobility, according to figures used for the reorganization of the House of Lords in 1854, at the top of the list of knightly estates (Rittergüter) with more than 100 years in the same family.91 Bismarck took up his position as an estate owner with some enthusiasm. As Erich Marcks wrote, ‘he had the power to command his lands and his people and the need to obey nobody. He wrote “Lordship” on protocols when bailiffs or pastors or schoolteachers came before him as judge with their complaints. He judged and acted to police his decisions.’92 He joined his fellow Junker landowners on local and county committees. In spite of all that, the size of the estates meant that the distance between one manor house and another was considerable and he spent a good deal of the time alone, reading and often drinking too much. He hunted with his neighbours and they came to hunt on his lands. Robert von Keudell, who later became one of Bismarck’s trusted aides, had taken a post as a junior lawyer in the provincial court at Cöslin. He heard and recorded stories of Bismarck’s crazy goings-on from an elderly Herr von der Marwitz-Rützenow who knew Otto well. Von der Marwitz described Bismarck’s simple hospitality whenever he had stopped over in Kniephof. He would put out a bottle of strong beer and one of champagne and would say in English ‘help yourself’. There would be a simple snack with a lot to drink and much conversation. He was already inventing a more appropriate past. Herr von der Marwitz recalled him saying

  In his youth he had wanted to be a soldier but his mother had wanted to be able to salute him as a well-heeled government councillor. For her sake he spent many years in the Justice and Administrative service but found it not to his taste. After her death, he came to the district and enjoyed the freedom of the country life in big drafts.93

  One night after a long journey, Herr von der Marwitz and a friend showed up unannounced at Kniephof. Bismarck welcomed them, set out the usual fare, and the visitors and their host sat late and drank a lot.

  He apologized in advance that he would not be able to see them at breakfast because he had to be in Naugard by 7 a.m. The guests needed to go there too and, though Bismarck strongly urged them to sleep as late as they liked, they eventually agreed that Bismarck would wake them at 6.30 in the morning. They drank on and eventually went to bed. The friend said to von der Marwitz, as they climbed the stairs to the guest room, ‘I have had more drink than I am used to and I want to sleep it off tomorrow morning.’ ‘You can’t do that,’ Herr von der Marwitz said. ‘Wait and see,’ replied the friend who pushed a huge chest of drawers against the door. At 6.30 in the morning, Bismarck knocked at the door. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from the room. Bismarck turned the doorknob and pushed the door against the heavy chest. A few minutes later he called out from the courtyard. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from us. Two pistol shots crashed through the window-glass and knocked plaster onto my friend, who crept to the window and stuck a white handkerchief out on the end of a stick. In a few minutes we were downstairs. Bismarck greeted us with his usual heartiness without a word about his little victory.94

  His behaviour as a host helped to earn him the title of ‘the mad Junker’ and stories like the one above, which spread through the county, multiplied as Bismarck behaved with his usual extravagance. He rode like a madman and had many accidents, which also became legendary. His pistol stories, his occasional romances, his extravagant conversation, and unconventional views became the talk of the county society. Keudell visited Moritz von Blanckenburg, who had known Bismarck from childhood and ran into him again at the Grey Cloister gymnasium. Moritz recalled that even in school he was a ‘puzzling person. I never saw him work. He went for long walks but still knew everything and always had the homework ready.’95

  The ‘mad Junker’ was lonely, restless, and dissatisfied behind the public bravado. He had begun to feel the need for something deeper in his life. He took long trips. One to England in 1842 he described in a letter to his father. He went to York and Hull and took the train to Manchester to see ‘the largest machine factory in the world’. England delighted him and, of course, he spoke excellent English after his two years living with or close to Motley. ‘The politeness and kindness of the English exceeded my expectations … even the common people are well-behaved. They look modest and understanding when you speak.’ He was surprised how relatively cheap hotels and meals were.

  This is country for heavy eaters … They serve huge breakfasts with many cuts of meat and at noon comes fish and an atrocious fruit tart. Soups are so strongly seasoned with white and black pepper that few foreigners can eat them. They never serve by the portion because even at breakfast the most colossal pieces of every sort of meat are available and they put them before you to cut as much or as little as you choose without effect on the bill.96

  When he was not travelling, as he wrote to his father, ‘I am so bored I could hang myself when I am alone at Kniephof.’97 In August of 1844 he went on holiday at Norderney, and wrote his father a superb description of the boat trip in a thunderstorm. He met for the first time the two
people who would most influence his life in the future: Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his Princess Augusta, who had been born Augusta Marie Luise Katharina von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. He had a pleasant time with them on the beach. He drew vivid word pictures of the long list of gentle-folk present. Bismarck paid particular attention to the young women, one of whom was described as having ‘good trotters’.

  Mornings either before or after bathing we play bowls with huge balls. The rest of the time we divide up among playing whist and pharo, mockery and flirting with the women, walking on the beach, eating oysters, shooting rabbits and evenings an hour or two of dancing. A monotonous but healthy way of life.98

  His private letters from 1843 reveal a kind of desperation: this huge man with his fierce, undirected ambition, his spectacular and extravagant behaviour, his tremendous urge to dominate, and his dread of boredom, resembled a massive engine with a steam boiler at highest pressure and the wheels locked by cast-iron breaks. He was also lonely and at 28 presumably sexually frustrated as well. On the other hand, he recalled only too well the humiliations and folly of his English affairs. On 10 September 1843 he wrote to a friend,

  I love contact with women but marriage is a dubious proposition and my experiences have made me think twice. I feel partly comfortable, partly bored and very chilled in my spirits, and as long as I can hold out, I will … I am toying with the idea of playing the Asian for a few years to bring a change in the stage design of my comedy, to smoke my cigars on the Ganges rather than the Rega.99

  That his life had become a drearily staged ‘comedy’ speaks volumes. A month later he wrote to his father to report on developments at Kniephof and explained that he had imported forty day-labourers from the Warthe swamp

  who work much better than our people and help with ploughing but they cost much more. But in the view of the rain I don’t know how we would have lifted the potatoes without them … Greet Malwine and come whole and healthy to see me. I am bored to the point of hanging myself.100

  At the end of the month of October 1843 he confided to his old friend and future brother-in-law, Oskar von Arnim-Kröchlendorff (1813–1903), that his financial affairs had

  gradually begun to find a baseline … When I am on my own, I get bored which I suppose must happen to every young, reasonably educated man in the country who is unmarried and relies on the society of a more numerous than interesting clique of Pomeranian squire-bumpkins, Philistines and Ulan officers.101

  Boredom often drove him to the neighbouring estate of his childhood playmate, Moritz von Blanckenburg, where he met Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, Moritz’s fiancée. His boredom and emptiness appalled her. On 7 February 1843 she wrote to Moritz:

  I have never seen anybody express his lack of faith or rather pantheism so freely and clearly … his bottomless boredom and emptiness … He was very upset, was sometimes red in the face but could not get anywhere … a certain shyness before the blue haze of his image of God.102

  This was the beginning of one of the most important relationships of Bismarck’s life. Meeting Marie brought him together with a remarkable young woman with whom he fell instantly and hopelessly in love. Had she been free, he might never have unified Germany, no matter how ridiculous that may sound. She had strength but of a kind that never threatened him. She saw through his extravagant façade and pitied him. She too fell in love with him, as this letter to one of her closest friends, Elizabeth von Mittelstädt, from May 1843, suggests with its disparaging judgement of her fiancé, Moritz von Blanckenburg:

  Otto B no longer shows his face in Zimmerhausen; very good because dear, good Moritz could not survive the comparison. That he stays away out of magnanimity I do not believe but because he has something else in mind.103

  Marie von Thadden and Elizabeth von Mittelstädt belonged to an important group of aristocratic Pietists, Christian believers who in America are known as ‘born-again’ Christians. Marie von Thadden’s serenity and strength came from her deep faith in the saving power of Jesus Christ, a power which worked directly on the souls of men, if they would just believe in him. She was the daughter of one of the founding members of the Junker version of Pietism who in 1813 in the ‘Christian German Table Club’ began meeting in Mai’s Inn in Berlin. The members soon gained the nickname of the ‘Maikäfer’ (May bugs). The main members were von Alvensleben-Erxleben, Gustav and Heinrich von Below, Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach, Cajus Count Stolberg, Count Voss, Friedrich Wilhelm Count von Götzen, Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, and the Crown Prince Frederick William. Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, Marie’s father, Ernst von Senfft-Pilsach, and Ludwig von Gerlach married three sisters Henriette, Ida, and Auguste von Oertzen.104 These men later became Bismarck’s ‘first political party’ and created the platform for everything that followed. They took him up after his ‘conversion’ and made him—understandably—their polemical sword. Nobody in their ranks could use the profane weapons of wit, commanding presence, brilliance, and literary elegance better than Otto von Bismarck. He became, they thought, the scourge of the ungodly. They were wrong. Bismarck served nobody, neither man nor God but only himself. That discovery in the 1870s tore from him the closest friends and mentors of his youth and left him desolate, and as lonely again as he had been in the 1840s.

  The impact of the defeat of Prussia in 1806 and the occupation of the kingdom by the ‘Godless’ Napoleon had driven many of the great Junker landlords back to Christianity. They rejected Enlightenment rationalism, the horrors of Jacobin fanaticism, the doctrines of equality, the guillotines, but also Frederick the Great’s cynical contempt for religion. Though they came out of Lutheran Protestantism, they rejected the official ‘walled’ churches and like all Evangelicals looked for the stirrings of God’s grace not in the Holy Sacraments of the Roman Catholic or Lutheran Churches but in the motions of their own hearts.

  In The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 Christopher Clark traces the peculiarly Lutheran variant of this general Evangelical movement. German Pietism combined evangelical inwardness and preoccupation about salvation through grace alone with organized and very Prussian institutions. The German Neo-Pietists often said mass in homes or in the open air. They communed with simple bread and wine as the early Christians had done. They observed the Sabbath and dedicated themselves to works of charity. Since the Hohenzollern dynasty had been Calvinist since 1603 but the majority of their subjects remained firmly Lutheran, the Pietists with their thrift and discipline became a group from whom the monarchs recruited efficient and pliant civil servants. These Christians brought no baggage of ancient Lutheran claims to feudal rights.

  Junker Pietists formed their own missionary society. In January 1822 the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews was founded by General Job von Witzleben. The von Witzleben family produced fourteen Generals between 1755 and 1976, one of whom, Field Marshall Job-Wilhelm Georg Erwin von Witzleben, was executed for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.105 Hitler ordered that he be hanged from a butcher’s hook and filmed in his final agonies so that the Führer could relish the death of a Junker aristocrat who had tried to kill him. His ancestor, Job von Witzleben, had been since 1817 chief of the King’s Military Cabinet, an office of the highest importance. The Allgemeine deutsche Biographie describes von Witzleben’s position in these words:

  There was no issue of importance—whether it concerned the army, the State, the Church or the royal family—which was not discussed by them. Witzleben’s opinion had great weight in the resolution of such questions … For twenty years he was the most powerful subject in the state.106

  Other founders included Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon, whom we have already met as tutor to the Crown Prince and as the Prussian Foreign Minister in 1832 who prevented Bismarck from entering the diplomatic service. The reader will recognize the same names as in the Christian German Table Society and among the Pietists with whom Bismarck now began to associate, such as Mari
e’s father, Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, or Ernst von Senfft-Pilsach, and the Gerlach brothers.107

  The milieu in which the members of the Christian nobility moved combined neo-Pietism with millenarian hopes for the conversion of the Jews as a sign that ‘the end of days’ had at last arrived. Their high status, personal connections with the Crown Prince, and the depth and sincerity of their convictions gave them a cohesiveness that could make them into a political movement when the right moment came. When Bismarck fell in love with Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, he could not, of course, have known it, but he had taken a step on which his entire career and subsequent life hinged. The members of the Christian German Table Society, the Society for the Conversion of the Jews, and his Evangelical Pomeranian neighbours held office across the spectrum of the army and bureaucracy. Their number contained future court officials and generals. When the Crown Prince Frederick William came to the throne in 1840, he brought Bismarck’s new friends to power with him and, when the unrest leading to the revolutions of 1848 broke out, his neo-Pietist friends would make Bismarck famous. It was also through Marie that he met Johanna von Puttkamer, his future wife.