Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  After the collapse of the revolutionary parliament in Frankfurt, Radowitz convinced Frederick William IV to use the new prestige of Prussia—the Frankfurt parliament had offered the German imperial crown to the Prussian king and Prussian force had suppressed tumult in Frankfurt and a peasants’ revolt in Baden—to unify Germany in a ‘Union’ of Princes on a federal basis but without Austria. Radowitz’s plan won the King’s approval and led to the calling of a meeting of princes.

  In Berlin Radowitz’s scheme for a Union had little support within Prussia. Radowitz had no office but his close friendship with the King gave him power. The King’s ministers mostly disliked the scheme. The camarilla hated it because it introduced an elected German parliament, the equivalent in their eyes of ‘revolution’. Radowitz repeatedly offered to withdraw. The King just as repeatedly ordered him to stay. The ‘Alliance of Three Kings’ concluded between Prussia, Saxony, and Hanover on 26 May 1849 bound the three states to form a union if all other German states, with the exception of Austria, agreed. At a meeting in Gotha on 25 June 1849, 150 former liberal deputies to the German national assembly acceded to the draft of the Union constitution. Under Prussian pressure twenty-eight German states recognized the constitution and joined the union by the end of August 1849 but Bavaria held out and the loyalty of Saxony and Hanover to the idea was never very strong. Radowitz finally took formal office on 26 September 1849 as Prussian Foreign Minister but he had no support around the ministerial table. The King backed him but ever less certainly.

  The idea made sense but it ran into two implacable foreign obstacles: the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire. The Tsar Nicholas I had been furious that Frederick William IV had surrendered to the ‘mob’ and referred to him as the ‘king of the pavements’ and the 18-year-old Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, had a new adviser, Prince Schwarzenberg. His Serene Highness Felix, the Prince of Schwarzenberg, Duke of Krumlov, Count of Sulz, Princely Landgrave of Kelttgau (1800–52) belonged to the highest European aristocracy and had a powerful personality. He had arranged with the Tsar to help crush the Hungarian revolution, had imposed an entirely centralized government system on the Habsburg dominions, and intended to restore the federal structure of Germany to its pre-1848 position with Austria as sole power as its president.

  On 31 January elections for the Union Parliament had taken place. Bismarck was elected and on 20 March 1850 the Union Parliament met in Erfurt for the first time. In spite of his reputation for black reaction Bismarck was elected as secretary of the parliament. He gave his first speech in the Erfurt House of the People on 15 April 1850 in which he objected to the term ‘German Empire’ because

  it runs the gravest risk a political measure can face, that of becoming ridiculous. … Gentlemen, if you make no concession to the Prussian, the old Prussian, the core Prussian spirit more than those made in this constitution and if you try to impose this constitution on the Prussian subject you find in him a bucephalus, which carries the rider whom it knows with courageous joy but the unauthorized Sunday rider complete with his black-red-gold embroidery it will dump into the sand (Loud applause on the right).114

  On 19 April, he wrote to Johanna:

  Things are heading to a crisis here. Radowitz and Manteuffel oppose each other. Brandenburg lets himself be wound round by Radowitz … so that at my urgent pleading Manteuffel set out for Berlin to see the King. For which side he opts will be decided in a day or two, and then either Erfurt is dead or Manteuffel is no longer minister. The little man has behaved very well and decisively; he wanted to break openly with Radowitz yesterday but Brandenburg prevented it … it’s awful to live in such a small city with 300 acquaintances. One cannot call a moment one’s own. An hour ago the last boring person left and I went to supper in the snug and consumed an entire wurst which tasted delicious, drank a pint of Erfurt Fellsenkeller beer and now as I write I have eaten the second box of marzipan, which may have been meant for Hans, who in any case got none of the wurst. In exchange I’ll leave him the ham.115

  At long last the summer holidays freed Bismarck from his seat on the podium in Erfurt and he had time to write to Hermann Wagener in June of 1850:

  I lead a bottomlessly lazy life here, smoking, reading, taking walks and playing family father. I hear about politics only through the Kreuzzeitung so I run absolutely no risk of contamination with heterodox ideas. My neighbours are not inclined to visit and this idyllic solitude suits me perfectly. I lie in the grass, read poetry, listen to music and wait for the cherries to ripen … The bureaucracy is eaten up by cancer in its head and members. Only the stomach remains healthy and the legal shit that it excretes is the most natural thing in the world. With this bureaucracy including the judges on the bench we can have press laws written by angels and they cannot lift us from the swamp. With bad laws and good civil servants (judges) one can still govern, with bad civil servants the best laws cannot help.116

  To his old college friend Gustav Scharlach he wrote about Radowitz from Schönhausen on 4 July 1850:

  Radowitz is a man who in no respect rises above the average save one, an astonishing memory by means of which he … affects in bits and pieces a comprehensive knowledge and memorizes good speeches for the gallery and the centre. In addition he has studied the weaker sides of our All-Highest Lord, knows how to impress him with gestures and grand words and to exploit his nobility and his weaknesses of character. In addition as a private person R. is a decent and unobjectionable human being, an excellent father of his family, but as a politician without an idea of his own, he lives from small expedients and fishes for popularity and applause, driven by immense personal vanity … 117

  In July Bismarck too had to face the prospect of being ‘an excellent father of his family’. He had to go with his wife and small children to the seaside, a prospect that filled him with gloom and took him away from politics. The letters he wrote to his sister about these holidays show Bismarck as a writer of comic genius. Here is one:

  The nearer it comes the more I see this as a ticket to the madhouse or to the Upper Chamber of parliament for life. I see myself with children on the platform at Genthin station, then in the compartment where both satisfy their needs ruthlessly and emit an evil stink, the surrounding society holding its nose. Johanna too embarrassed to give the baby the breast so he screams himself blue, the battle with the crowd, the inn, screaming children on Stettin station and in Angermünde 1 hour waiting for horses, packing up, and how do we get from Kröchlendorf to Külz? If we had to spend the night in Stettin, that would be terrible. I went through that last year with Marie and her screaming … I am, I feel, somebody to whom a dreadful injustice has been done. Next year I shall have to travel with three cradles, three nurses, nappies for three, bed clothes; I wake at 6 in the morning in a gentle rage and cannot sleep at night because I am haunted by all sorts of travel pictures, which my fantasy paints in the blackest hues, right to the picnics in the dune of Stolpmünde. And if there were only daily payments for this but instead it causes the ruin of a once flourishing fortune by travelling with infants—I am very unhappy.118

  September meant parliament, Berlin and, at long last, escape from the stresses of family life. The crisis over the Erfurt Union had not yet been resolved. Austria and Prussia headed for a serious clash. On 27 August 1850 Schwarzenberg declared the Union plans incompatible with the Federal Act and called for an emergency meeting of the German Confederation on 2 September 1850, in Frankfurt. Schwarzenberg shrewdly took advantage of the fact that the old German Confederation, the Bund, still existed, because in July of 1848 it had not announced ‘the end of its existence’ but instead ‘the end of its previous activity’.119 Then a crisis blew up in the Electoral Duchy of Hesse-Cassel where the reactionary duke had turned the clock back to 1847, annulled the gains of the revolution, and restored absolutism. His subjects who had enjoyed freedoms under their new constitution rebelled by going on a tax strike. On 17 September 1850 the Grand Duke, Frederick William II, appealed to the German
Confederation under the terms of its foundation for ‘federal execution’—that is, military intervention—to help him restore order. The territories of Hesse-Cassel lay between the western Prussian provinces and the main body of the Prussian Kingdom and the idea that Saxon or Hanoverian troops might block Prussia’s east-west axis alarmed and outraged senior officers who otherwise wanted nothing to do with the Erfurt Union, its parliament, or any other such institution.

  On 1 November 1850 troops of the German Confederation marched into the Electorate of Hesse. The Prussian action to protect its lines of communication put the King into the absurd position of defending ‘revolution’ against a legitimate sovereign and Tsar Nicholas made such threats that the King dismissed Radowitz on 2 November. The Prussian government drifted toward a war with Austria and the German Confederation to defend a position which nobody accepted any longer but to admit that would be to suffer a complete humiliation. Things went badly in the military preparations for a war which now had no object. As Arden Bucholz writes:

  from 6 November 1850 to 31 January 1851, the Kingdom of Prussia carried out its first war mobilization for thirty-five years. It was a disaster from start to finish … The War Ministry, and below it, the command and staff headquarters were in chaos.120

  Members of the royal family argued, the cabinet split, and the atmosphere grew more ominous.

  The game of bluff ended when the Prussian government gave in. On 29 November 1850 Manteuffel and Schwarzenberg signed a convention, the Punktation of Olmütz, in which Prussia withdrew her troops from the Electorate of Hesse and abandoned the Union project. The Prussian surrender to Austria ranks with the Battle of Jena as a moment of national humiliation. Austria and Prussia agreed to restore the German Confederation jointly but the Austrians ignored the promise.121 The shame of Olmütz crushed even the most bitter opponents of the Erfurt scheme. Otto von Bismarck was not one of them. On 3 December 1850 he made one of the most important speeches of his entire career. It had a new tone, one for which he would become famous:

  Why do great states fight wars today? The only sound basis for a large state is egoism and not romanticism; this is what necessarily distinguishes a large state from a small one. It is not worthy for a large state to fight a war that is not in its own interests. Just show me an objective worth a war, gentlemen, and I will agree with you … The honour of Prussia does not in my view consist of playing Don Quixote to every offended parliamentary bigwig in Germany who feels his local constitution is in jeopardy.122

  The speech made a real impact. His conservative friends had 20,000 copies printed and circulated throughout the country. The tone, realistic, unemotional, and based on material interest, marks the moment when Bismarck, the practitioner of Realpolitik, made his public debut. The Gerlachs could not complain because his icy realism had saved them from the humiliation of an outraged public. Lothar Gall adds another consideration. Bismarck’s parliamentary skills would never bring him power in the new neo-absolutist constitutional structure which post-1850 Prussia would become. Thus the prospect of leading the conservatives in the Landtag as an unpaid parliamentary performer was ‘uninteresting’. Real power would remain in the King’s weak hands and palace figures would control it. Gall writes: ‘the goal of the Olmütz speech was, therefore, to recommend himself for a high state office.’123 Without qualifications, without experience, and without a reputation for reliability, Bismarck still hoped to find a post in the diplomatic service which would move him onto a very different scene, one for which, as it turned out, he had a natural flair.

  1851 began and nothing much seemed to be happening. Bismarck’s letters to his wife are full of gossip and small matters. In March he wrote about a fire in the Prussian House of Lords and how much the Berliners enjoyed it. He quoted their jokes in dialect ‘burning questions’—‘who would have thought that the old place had so much fire in it?’ ‘At last the light has been turned on!’,124 and a few days later that Hans had come back from Halle but had not slept at home for five nights.

  I got so worried about him, even though he tyrannizes me, that I had him paged in the visitors lounge [at the Landtag—JS] and he came at once. People talk about his making a very profitable marriage but I doubt it. He is in his personality and his inner nature so buttoned up as if we have only known each other for three days. The young lady in question [Gräfin Charlotte zu Stolberg-Wingerode] is shrewd, pretty, charming and devout, in addition a rich heiress and from a good family. I should like to grant her to him if her parents think as I do.125

  In early April he wrote home on religion:

  Yesterday at your bidding I went to see [Pastor] Knaak again. For my taste he draws the strings too tight. He considers not only all dancing, but also all theatre-going and all music, which is not done for ‘the honour of God’ but just for pleasure sinful and a denial of God, as St Peter said, ‘I know not this man’. That goes too far for me, it’s zealotry. But I love him personally and do him no injury in spirit … 126

  On 10 April 1851 the Landtag shut for the Easter holidays and Bismarck went home to Schönhausen for the break with no news about a possible new job. On 23 April he returned to Berlin at Hans’s request and, as they lay in the dark in their little flat in the Jägerstrasse, Kleist told Bismarck that he had decided to ask for the hand of Countess Charlotte zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, who was about to be a Deaconess. Then he told Bismarck that he had been to Manteuffel to ask about his future. Manteuffel had told him that he was to become Regierunspräsident [Provincial Governor] in Cöslin and Bismarck was to go to Frankfurt as Ambassador. As his biographer writes,

  He never forgot that hour, and he came to think of himself as a prophet when he decided to follow the custom of the ‘awakened’ on solemn occasions, as, for example, in the home of Princess Marianne of Prussia, to give somebody a Bible verse to accompany him or her in life. The 149th Psalm was to serve as Bismarck’s guide in his future career, especially verses 5 to 9:

  5 Let the saints be joyful in glory;

  Let them sing aloud on their beds.

  6 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth,

  And a two-edged sword in their hand,

  7 To execute vengeance on the nations,

  And punishments on the peoples;

  8 To bind their kings with chains,

  And their nobles with fetters of iron;

  9 To execute on them the written judgment—

  This honor have all His saints.

  Later when his friend solved the German question with the two-edged sword, deposed kings and princes, enthroned an Emperor and humiliated an over-mighty nation, Kleist recalled that hour in the quiet student flat in the Jägerstrasse and saw that the words he had given Bismarck had been fulfilled.127

  Five days later, Bismarck wrote to Johanna with the news that he had seen ‘Fradiavolo’ (Bismarck’s nickname for Minister-President Manteuffel) and Manteuffel had explained that as a consequence of Olmütz, the vacant post of Prussian envoy to the Bund, the German Confederation, in Frankfurt had to be filled. The plan was to send Theodor Heinrich von Rochow (1784–1854), an experienced diplomat in his late 60s, as the first delegate initially with Bismarck there as successor to take over in two months, when von Rochow would move on to the senior position of Prussian Ambassador to the Imperial Russian court. Bismarck’s apprenticeship was over. He was now to make his first appearance on the great stage of European diplomacy which he would eventually dominate in his unique way.128

  5

  Bismarck as Diplomat, 1851–1862

  Bismarck had been appointed envoy to a very odd institution: the German Confederation. The German Confederal Treaty of June 1815 (revised by the Final Act of 1820) re-created Napoleon’s Confédération du Rhin with Austria in the place of France as guiding power. To do that, Metternich had to accept the way Napoleon had transformed Europe and to make a pact with ‘revolution’. He had to abandon the Austrian Habsburgs’ justified claims on states which had stolen territory under Napoleon and ign
ore the claims of disposed princes to get their lands back. He did all that and more to secure the Habsburg Monarchy its rightful place as arbiter of Europe.

  The German Confederation or Deutscher Bund, which the Congress of Vienna designed, was a loose confederation of thirty-nine states. The Federal Assembly in Frankfurt represented the sovereigns, not the people of those states. The Austrian Emperor and the Prussian King had one vote in the Federal Assembly. Three member states were ruled by foreign monarchs: the Kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, and Great Britain (until 1837 when Queen Victoria could not as a woman succeed to the throne of Hanover). All three foreign kings were members of the German Confederation; each of them had a vote in the Federal Assembly. Six other kings or grand dukes had one vote each in the Federal Assembly: the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, the Prince-Elector of Hesse-Kassel, the Grand Duke of Baden, and the Grand Duke of Hesse. Twenty-three smaller and tiny member states shared five votes in the Federal Assembly. The four free cities Lübeck, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Hamburg shared one vote in the Federal Assembly.