Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Through the Pietists Bismarck came to know Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach (1795–1877), intellectually one of the most important figures among the group, and a very important person in Bismarck’s career. In 1835 Gerlach became Deputy Chief Judge of the Superior Provincial Court in Frankfurt an der Oder. There he gathered round him the smartest and most interesting young lawyers. Privy Councillor Schede recalled:

  In the Collegium of the County Court he was surrounded almost completely by opponents but as a Jurist he had gradually accustomed them to his direction. He had a firm hand on the reins. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to argue a case with well-trained young lawyers, but they could never prevail against his mind and his gifts. It was a joy to listen to him. In his home the impression of the significance of his personality and the unity of his character and life were even more powerful. I have never met anybody who had such a massive personal impact.108

  The romantic poet, Clemens Brentano, said of him: ‘Ludwig was for me from the first moment a frightening figure.’ Herman Wagener, one of Bismarck’s closest collaborators and first editor of the famous Kreuzzeitung, the daily newspaper closest to the Prussian aristocracy, was also a Referendar (legal trainee) in Gerlach’s court, as was ‘little Hans’ von Kleist-Retzow, Bismarck’s friend. From 1842 both Wagener and Kleist went to the theological evenings which Ludwig organized and which Ludwig’s brother, Colonel Leopold von Gerlach, then Chief of Staff of the III Army Corps, also attended.109 Leopold, later General Adjutant to King Frederick William IV, and his brother Judge Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach became in the late 1840s Bismarck’s political patrons and managers. They had direct access to the King. In 1851 they convinced the King to appoint a 37-year-old ‘mad Junker’ with no diplomatic experience, a reputation for violent and extravagant gestures, too clever by half, and of dubious character, to the second most important diplomatic post in Germany, Prussian Ambassador to the German Bundesrat or Federal Council in Frankurt. The Gerlachs ‘made’ Bismarck and Leopold in particular saw Bismarck as ‘his’ creature. That was an error of historic proportions. When Bismarck began to reveal his true objectives and methods, they discovered that they had put an opponent of theirs into power. Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach became a sworn enemy of Bismarck in the late 1860s. In 1874 Bismarck dismissed his old master from his post as a judge on Prussian High Court Judge without a second thought.

  This was the milieu that Marie von Thadden and her fiancé Moritz von Blanckenburg moved in. It attracted Bismarck powerfully both as he fell under the spell of the beautiful Marie and came to meet the powerful Junker neighbours who had firm and pleasingly reactionary views. Bismarck would have recognized at once the chance that this group offered him, but it came at a personal price. As a result, Bismarck stayed away from Marie in 1844 but his mood worsened. On 7 February 1844 he complained to his sister: ‘Nothing to report from here … I feel more and more how alone I am in the world.’110 In desperation he returned to the civil service in Potsdam but could not bear it more than a few weeks. In late May he wrote to Karl Friedrich von Savigny from Naugard to say his sister-in-law had died suddenly and he had to go to his brother’s place:

  Would you be good enough to go to my apartment and collect the government stuff for Bülow? … Forgive me if I rely on your good will in this request but it was you who tempted me to Potsdam and you must now bear the consequences.111

  In August 1844 he wrote to his university friend Scharlach and summed up his situation:

  For the last five years I have lived alone in the country and have with some success dedicated myself to the improvement in my credit, but I can no longer bear the lonely country Junker life and struggle with myself whether to occupy myself in state service or to go on long journeys. In the meantime I applied for a post in the provincial government, worked for six weeks but found the people and the duties as shallow and unsatisfying as before. Since then I have been on leave, and row without will on the stream of life without any rudder beyond the impulse of the moment and am completely indifferent about where it throws me up on the shore.112

  On 4 October 1844 Bismarck travelled to Zimmerhausen to attend the wedding of Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff and Moritz von Blanckenburg. It was a memorable day in all sorts of ways. Moritz had long wanted to introduce Otto to ‘little Hans’ von Kleist-Retzow. On 3 September 1844 Hans Kleist had just passed his third and final law exam with distinction and had gone in high spirits to the Blanckenburg/Thadden wedding. Moritz introduced Otto and Hans having told each that the other was deaf so both shouted at each other for a long time until Moritz had pity on them. Hermann von Petersdorff, ‘little Hans’s’ biographer, observes that ‘thus the most important and significant friendship of his life begins with symbolic significance. The day would come when the two really did not understand each and the practical joker of 4 October 1844 could not contribute to their mutual understanding.’113 The wedding ended disastrously. The family had ordered a fireworks display, which got out of hand and destroyed in a big fire much of the village of Zimmerhausen.114 A bad omen.

  Hans von Kleist-Retzow was undoubtedly the only really close friend that Bismarck made after his friendship with Motley and Keyserling. Hans was born on the family estate in Kieckow on 25 November 1814. The Kleist-Retzow family was ‘by far the most powerful in Kreis Belgard’ and owned in 1907 about one-fifth of the estates in the district.115 As a child he had wanted to be a missionary and the persecution of the Old Lutherans by the royal government, which upset him very much, kept that urge alive. Unlike Bismarck’s Pomeranian friends, Hans remained a devout but Orthodox Lutheran.116 At 14 he went to the Landesschule Pforta, the best classical gymnasium in Prussia, which, rather like Dr Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School in exactly the same years, was governed by twelve student Inspektoren. At Rugby they were called Praeposters. There his best friend was Ernst Ranke, younger brother of the great historian, Leopold von Ranke. Hans hated the idea of becoming a soldier. His biographer writes that he had ‘a creeping horror of the soulless existence of the parade ground’ and refused to serve, ‘which caused his father to shed “bitter tears”’,117 understandably when we recall that 116 von Kleists served Frederick the Great in the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763, of whom 30 died in battle or subsequently from wounds and disease.118 In May 1835 he matriculated in Berlin University for three semesters and lived with Ernst Ranke,119 who remembered that he began each morning with a reading of the Greek New Testament. In December 1836 Kleist matriculated in Göttingen, where he rose at four each morning to study the bible, a daily practice which he tried without success to impose on Bismarck. When he met Bismarck, he had already spent three years as a Referendar in the Superior Civil Court in Frankfurt an der Oder under Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach but unlike many others he had admired but not worshipped the Master. He was elected Landrat, the Prussian chief administrator of a country district, in 1845 for Kreis Belgard, a county of 20 square miles with about 31,000 inhabitants and one substantial village, the town of Belgard, which had 3,327 inhabitants.120 He, also unmarried, settled down to the life of a rural squire.

  In April 1845 Bismarck wrote to his sister Malwine, now married to Oskar von Arnim-Kröchelndorff, that things were getting desperate:

  Only with difficulty can I resist the urge to fill an entire letter with agricultural complaints: night frosts, sick cow, bad rapeseed and bad roads, dead lambs, hungry sheep, lack of straw, fodder, money, potatoes, and dung … I must—the Devil take me—marry. That has become absolutely clear to me. Now that father has gone away, I feel lonely and abandoned, and mild, damp weather makes me melancholy, full of yearning, and love-sick.121

  Bismarck—now that Marie was married—began to visit Zimmerhausen again and not without an impact on Marie. In May 1845, she wrote to her friend Elizabeth von Mittelstädt:

  Otto has become much closer to me in these days than for weeks. We have reached out our hands to each other, and I think, that it is not a temporary contact. You have never understood that I see so much behind his
often cold elegance so it may appear laughable to you that I have reached out for such a friendship, but it occupies me too much these last days for me to pass over it in silence. Perhaps it is the expression of a personal freedom, which makes so attractive this friendship with a Pomeranian phoenix, who is a prodigy of wildness and arrogance.122

  In July 1845 Marie von Thadden wrote to Johanna von Puttkamer that the group had read Romeo and Juliet with Bismarck present,

  Can you believe it? Ademar [code name for Bismarck] read the lover to me [as Juliet]. I don’t think it was a trick of our host but just chance … I had so many truths to express, all of which came from the soul that I forgot everything which might have made me embarrassed, even the indecent parts, which we agreed before hand—through Moritz’s intervention—to leave out.123

  Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff was all of 23 when Bismarck, just over 30, played Romeo to her Juliet. She was a beautiful, intelligent, and deeply pious young woman. She had met nobody like Bismarck and that was hardly surprising. There was nobody like him. The two letters suggest pretty clearly that Marie and Otto were in love and also engaged in a struggle for his immortal soul. The latter struggle—the Christian mission—may have made it tolerable for Moritz von Blanckenburg, Bismarck’s friend and Marie’s husband, to allow the relationship to deepen. But what did Johanna von Puttkamer think then and, more importantly, think later?

  A few months after the play reading Ferdinand von Bismarck fell ill and his son Otto rushed to Schönhausen to care for him. As he wrote to his sister at the end of September 1845, to describe their Father’s illness, there was a blockage in his throat, which prevented him from taking food and the doctors had to put tubes down his throat.

  The way he is being fed that I have described is too artificial and uncertain to allow us to have any hope for him unless he regains in greater measure the ability to swallow naturally. … [Bismarck stayed with him] for it would be miserable for the old man to spend his last few weeks alone and without a member of the family by him.

  On 22 November 1845 Ferdinand von Bismarck died.124 Bismarck had no choice but to move to Schönhausen to run the estate after his father’s death and Bernhard took over Kniephof. The relationship with Marie continued to deepen. In April 1846 Bismarck wrote a long letter in rhyming couplets to accompany a pile of poetry books and apples from his orchard. Here are the first three couplets of a very long, elegant, and ironic poem in rhyming verse.

  Am letzten Dienstag sagten Sie,

  Es fehlte mir an Poesie

  Damit Sie nun doch klar ersehen

  Wie sehr Sie mich da misverstehen

  So schreibe ich Ihnen, Frau Marie,

  In Versen, gleich des Morgens früh.125

  Tuesday last you said to me

  That I was lacking poetry

  That you may now quite clearly see

  How much you have mistaken me

  Madame Marie I write to you

  Verses fresh with morning dew.

  [trans.—JS]

  A few weeks later, he wrote another letter, full of his charm and literary self-awareness:

  Dear Frau Marie,

  About to depart, I have just received from Schönhausen a package of green beans, which I cannot completely use up. Regard them, please, not as a sacrifice, which I withdraw from the Moloch which dwells within me, if I lay them at your feet. I include some marjoram and the long promised Schönhausen normal bread, in addition Lenau Part II and some Bech, the pages of which you may cut. Some more I cannot add because for the moment my mind fills itself with field drainage and bog cultivation. Rereading this letter I note three ‘somes’ in three lines but in an amazing way no ‘probably’. Thus one improves. Be well and pass my compliments, if I may ask you, to anybody whom you choose.126

  Four months later, Marie von Thadden-Blanckenburg died on 10 November 1846, aged 24. Bismarck was shattered in a way that neither the death of his father nor his mother had evoked. He wrote to his sister that he had been startled by the horror of losing somebody from his immediate circle:

  If anything were needed to make the decision to leave Pomerania easier, this was it. This is really the first time that I have lost somebody through death, who was close to me and whose passing leaves an unexpected hole in my circle of life … This feeling of emptiness, the thought never again to see or hear a dear person who had become necessary to me—and of those I have few—was so new that I cannot get used to it and the whole event has not yet become real to me. Enviable is the confidence of the relatives. They think of this death as an early journey, which in the long or short run will be followed by a joyful reunion.127

  Hans Kleist and Bismarck tried to comfort Moritz after Marie died, as Moritz recalled in a letter to Hans von Kleist forty years later:

  There we sat, the three of us, you, Otto and I as the cold northeast wind blew, on three stools with our legs stretched out onto the kitchen hearth.128

  The death of Marie triggered a series of decisions in Bismarck’s life. On 18 November, scarcely a week later, Bismarck signed a contract giving Herr Klug the tenancy of Kniephof. Klug had formerly been tenant of Pansin. Next he decided to marry Marie’s friend, Johanna von Puttkamer. On 16 December 1846, Bismarck wrote the famous Werbebrief (suitor letter) to Heinrich von Puttkamer asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Oceans of ink have been poured by previous biographers in their attempts to make sense of this letter. Had Bismarck really become a Christian, indeed a Pietist, and what relationship had this account of his conversion to his subsequent ruthless use of power? Those are interesting questions but more interesting—and less considered—is why Johanna wanted to marry Bismarck. She must have known and seen with her own eyes Bismarck’s passion for her friend. She had neither good looks nor Marie’s intellectual interests. Bismarck would not send her books of philosophy.

  Johanna von Puttkamer was born on the family estate of Reinfeld in remotest Pomerania, hard by the Polish border, on 11 April 1824, so she was just 21 when she got to know Bismarck through her friend Marie. Her family was—even among the Pietists of Pomerania—well known for their extreme severity. She had an elder brother who died in childhood and thus she grew up as an only child. Pictures of her as a young woman show her with a long face with prominent jaw. She was the daughter of a country squire on a remote estate in a remote region and had never seen much of the great world.

  What Johanna may have thought, we do not know, but in any case on 21 December 1846, Otto von Bismarck wrote to Heinrich von Puttkamer the famous Werbebrief:

  I begin this letter by stating from the outset its content: it is a request for the highest which you have to grant in this world, the hand of your daughter … What I can do is to tell you with complete openness about myself … and especially my relationship to Christianity … At an early age I was estranged from my parental home and never felt fully at home thereafter. My education was dictated by the intention to develop my understanding and the early acquisition of positive knowledge. After an irregularly attended and imperfectly understood religious instruction, I was baptized by Schleiermacher in my 16th year and had no other faith than naked deism which soon became mixed with pantheistic tendencies … Thus without any control other than the conventional social limitations, I plunged into the world, partly seducer and partly seduced, and into bad company …

  He claims that it was the ‘loneliness after the death of my mother, which brought me to Kniephof … [where] the inner voice began …’. Through Moritz von Blackenburg, he came into contact with the Trieglaff circle:

  and found there people who made me ashamed … I felt myself soon at home in that circle and with Moritz and his wife who became dear to me as a sister to a brother, and discovered a well-being which I had never experienced before, a family life that included me, a home at last … I felt bitter regret over my previous existence … The news of the death of our dear friend in Cardemin, provoked the first sincere prayer without reflections about the reasonableness of the act that I had e
ver expressed and tears which I had not shed since my childhood. God did not hear my prayer but He did not reject it either. For I have not lost the ability to pray since that time and became aware of something not exactly peace but a will to live as I had never before known it … What value you place on the change of heart hardly two months old I cannot say …

  He asks only to be allowed to come in person to Reinfeld and plead his case.129

  After years of knowing that such a letter had been written, I approached it in the expectation that I would find the confessions of a ‘born-again’ Christian. The letter makes no such claim. Indeed it says very little about Bismarck’s state of soul or relationship to God. On the face of it, we cannot say why Herr von Puttkamer acceded to Bismarck’s request. Shortly after New Year 1847, Herr von Puttkamer replied affirmatively but asked very properly for some firm commitment to a new Christian life from a possible son-in-law. Bismarck replied on 4 January,

  You ask me, honoured Herr von Puttkamer, whether my feet have taken certain steps. I can only reply in the affirmative to your next question, that I am firmly and in many ways determined to pursue that peace with all and that sanctification without which no one can see the Lord. Whether my steps are as secure as I would want them to be, I am not in a position to say. I see myself rather the lame person who without the help of the Lord will stumble.