Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  The new German Confederation enshrined in the Final Act of 1820 put the capstone of the Metternichian system into place by ‘solving’ the German problem.

  Article 1 of the Treaty declared that the

  deutscher Bund [the German Confederation] is an international association of German sovereign princes and free cities to preserve the independence and inviolability of the member states and to preserve the inner and outer security of Germany.1

  Article 5 declared that the Bund was permanent and no state was ‘free’ to leave it—as we shall see, an important provision for Bismarck in 1866. Articles 6 and Article 11 established a general assembly of the Bund as the decision-making body but in addition created a ‘narrower’ Council where decisions would be taken by absolute majority vote. Article 20 allowed the General Assembly to take action on behalf of member states which had been subject to improper violence or force by another member or members. A large number of the articles concerned the danger of revolution and the means for intervention to suppress it. There was a Federal Court to decide cases of conflict among member states. Article 58 forbade the sovereign prince of each state to allow any existing landständische Verfassung (constitution based on the ‘estates of the realm’) to overrule his obligations to the Bund.

  The structure and arrangement of the Final Act of 1820 have the charm and clarity of the Lisbon Treaty of the European Union of 2007. Nobody but experts ever really cared to understand it, just as today very few outside Brussels can explain how the EU works. In 1858 the Deutsches Staats-Wörtebuch, the leading German legal dictionary, could not define the relationship between the ‘narrower Council’ and the General Assembly or Plenum: ‘The narrower Council is not a senate, there are no chambers or houses … There is only one organ of the Bund, the Bundesversammlung [Federal Assembly]’.2 The editors could not define precisely what ‘the narrower Council’ was supposed to do and simply gave up. The Deutscher Bund differed in several fundamental respects from its descendent, the European Union. In the Bund nobody pretended that it represented the ‘people’; the EU claims exactly that though with what justice arouses fierce debate. In the second place, the two leading German powers, Austria and Prussia, had retained much greater independence than the European states have today. Not all their territories belonged to the Bund. Their armies remained under the command of their Emperor and King and their domestic tax and spending policies, their internal legislation, and religious establishments had nothing to do with the Bund.

  The main difficulty which faced Bismarck on his appointment as Prussian ambassador to the Bund in 1851 lay in the inequality of the two great Powers. The Bund had been revived after the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 because it suited Austria, as it had in 1815, to control Germany in a loose federal scheme. The small states had less to fear from a rambling, decentralized, and multinational empire under the Habsburgs than they had from much more tightly governed and much more single-minded Kingdom of Prussia. The appointment—in spite of the oddity of the institution to which he had been accredited—placed Bismarck in the perfect arena: the place where the two great German powers confronted each other face to face.

  In the immediate future the new job made a huge difference to Otto and Johanna von Bismarck. On 3 May he wrote his wife a letter which contains the amazing statement that he had not done a thing to get the promotion:

  Weigh the anchor of your soul and prepare yourself to leave the home port. I know from my own feelings how painful the thought must be to you to leave, how sad your parents are. But I repeat I have not with a syllable wished or sought this appointment. What ever happens, I am God’s soldier and where he sends me I must go.3

  Why did he lie to his wife so blatantly? All the evidence shows that he had been intriguing and scheming to get a proper diplomatic job for months. His efforts had been crowned with more success than he dared to hope, as he admitted in the slightly more honest, excited letter he wrote when he heard the news. He had ended up with the perfect job for him and his talents. Why not rejoice with her on his success? One answer is that he had always lied in personal matters, to his mother and to his father. It had become habitual to avoid the truth in his personal affairs and, as we have seen, he resorted to lies to cover his mistakes. He had to pretend that God had worked in mysterious ways to get her to accept the new life. If God had called, that would be something that Johanna as an evangelical would not be able to contradict or question.

  In the second place, the appointment to Frankfurt must have brought home to him with dismay that he had a problem with his wife. She was not beautiful, spoke no languages, had no dress sense, and no experience of the grand world of courts. She would never be a society lady capable of moving gracefully across the grand stage of European high society and Johanna would not make an effort to become one. An old friend from the Pietist circle, Hedwig von Blanckenburg, wrote to Johanna a few days later and warned her about her attitude:

  One thing really pains me, that is that you still see everything the way you did five years ago and that I can hardly understand … Everything that belongs to those days lives on in me, but I now have other things to do, more serious things, but do not lack the inner glow. Johanna, dear Johanna! We cannot stay children, who play and fool about, we must become serious people in the service of the Lord.4

  Bismarck certainly begged her to make that effort. Shortly after he arrived in Frankfurt on 14 May 1851, he wrote:

  It now looks certain that I shall take over Rochow’s post here this summer. Then I shall have, if the amount remains constant, 21,000 Reichsthaler salary, but must maintain a considerable staff and household, and you, my poor child, must sit stiffly and nobly in a salon, be called Excellency and be wise and clever with Excellencies … One request I do have but please keep it to yourself and please do not let Mother hear it or she will make a fuss worrying about it, occupy yourself with your French as much as you can in the time but do it as if it occurred to you on your own. Read as much French as you can but not by candle light and not if your eyes hurt … I did not marry you in order to have a society wife for others, but in order to love you in God and according to the requirements of my own heart, to have a place in this alien world that no barren wind can cool, a place warmed by my own fireplace, to which I can draw near while it storms and freezes outside. And I want to tend my own fire and lay on wood, blow the flames, and protect it and shelter it against all that is evil and foreign.5

  It is a beautiful peace of prose but it conceals the problem. He may not have married Johanna ‘in order to have a society wife for others’ but he needed her to become one now, and that she absolutely refused to concede. She never did learn French and never provided him with the glamour he needed professionally. As she grew older, she did it less and less. By the time Bismarck had been in the diplomatic service for a decade, she had become what Holstein as a young attaché in St Petersburg described as ‘a peculiar person’. Nobody can know the secrets of a marriage but we can see with great clarity that he simply gave up after a certain point. The Bismarcks dined unfashionably at 5.00 in the late afternoon, a custom which everybody in Frankfurt and Berlin thought odd. The Prussian Embassy in Frankfurt and later the official residence at 76 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin looked as if a rural squire and his ‘churchy’ wife had settled into the Chancellor’s palace. My hunch is that Johanna refused to make an effort to become what Bismarck needed because of resentment. He proposed to her ‘on the rebound’ from Marie von Thadden and her refusal to make herself attractive was a form of mute protest. For his part, marriage had clearly not satisfied his physical needs, as he wrote in distress to Hans von Kleist from his solitary, bachelor life in Frankfurt during June 1851:

  The chief weapon with which evil assaults me is not desire for external glory, but a brutal sensuality which leads me so close to the greatest sins that I doubt at times that I will gain access to God’s mercy. At any rate I am certain that the seed of God’s word has not found fertile ground in a heart laid waste as it w
as from youth. Otherwise I could not be so much the plaything of temptation, which even invades my moments of prayer … Comfort me, Hans, but burn this without speaking of it to anyone.6

  Four years after his marriage, he confessed to his closest friend a ‘brutal sensuality’ and his temptation to commit ‘the greatest sins’. Whatever Bismarck did in secret, we simply do not know but the letter suggests that his marriage had not removed those urges.

  On the other hand, Hans had got engaged to his Protestant nun, Countess Marie von Stolberg-Wenigerode, as Bismarck wrote:

  Hans is unbearably happy, won’t go to bed and behaves like a kid. It is still supposed to be confidential but Hans cannot keep it to himself. He wants to carve it in every pavement and tells everybody, friend and foe, in the blissful certainty that all conflict in the world will now cease and everybody will be happy. He has a completely different face, dances and sings the strangest songs when he is alone in his room. In short the old sour puss is no longer recognizable and, if he in his joy would let me sleep at night, that would be nice.7

  On 8 May the King received Bismarck and promoted him to Geheimer Legationsrat (Privy Legation Councillor); as Bismarck remarked it was ‘an irony with which God punishes me for my blasphemy against all Privy Councillors’.8 Ludwig von Gerlach was not enthusiastic about Bismarck’s sudden promotion to the top of the diplomatic service and doubted the wisdom of ‘violent promotions’. After all, Bismarck’s official career amounts up to now to that of a failed Referendar.9 The new post transformed his economic situation: 21,000 Reichstaler amounted to over £3,134 at the 1871 conversion rate. This was a very handsome stipend even by English standards. In Barchester Towers, published in 1857 by Anthony Trollope, Bismarck’s exact contemporary, Wilfred Thorne, Esq. the Squire of St Ewold’s, had an income of £4,000, which allowed him to be a sportsman with the horses, grooms, and hounds that such pursuits required.10 And, of course, England was much more expensive than Germany. In comparison to his fellow Prussians, Bismarck had shot up the income table. The Prussian income tax distribution lists taxpayers by tax category and shows the percentage of the population paying each amount. Fortunately there are figures for 1851, which show that Bismarck had now joined the very top of the income pyramid. Prussian incomes as well as income taxes were very low at that time so he had for the first time in his life a handsome annual salary:

  On 10 May 1851 Bismarck left Berlin for Frankfurt by train, a trip which he accomplished in the amazingly quick time of twenty-five hours.12 A week on the job, Bismarck had begun to complain about it and the other envoys:

  Frankfurt is horribly boring … In essence nothing but spying on each other as if we had something worth finding out and worth revealing. Life here is almost entirely pure trivialities with which people torture themselves. I am making astonishing progress in the art of using lots of words to say nothing. I fill pages with nice round script which reads like leading articles in the papers and, if Manteuffel, after he has read them, can say what’s in them, then he knows a lot more than I do.13

  In early June, he wrote to Herman Wagener, editor of the Kreuzzeitung, to say that letters were systematically opened by the Austrians and to ask him to send correspondence to Hochstrasse 45, Frankfurt am Main, but addressed to ‘Mr Wilhelm Hildebrand’, Bismarck’s man-servant. Frankfurt diplomacy was ridiculous:

  The Austrians are constantly engaged in intrigue behind a mask of jolly bonhomie … and are always trying with smallish matters of form to cheat us, which so far has been our entire occupation. The envoys from the little states are caricatures of old-fashioned, be-wigged diplomats who immediately put on their ‘report-face’ if you ask for a light for your cigar and look as if they are about to make a speech before the old Imperial Aulic Court if you ask for the key to the t——.14

  The chief Austrian intriguer was a grand aristocrat, Friedrich Franz Count von Thun und Hohenstein (1810–81), a member of one of the oldest dynasties in the Habsburg monarchy. He had heard about the new Prussian envoy and wrote to Vienna about his first impressions:

  In all fundamental issues, which concern the conservative principle, Herr von Bismarck is perfectly correct and will cause damage more by his overly great zeal than by hesitation or indecision. On the other hand, he seems to me, as far as I can judge, to belong exclusively to that party which has its eye only on Prussian interests and places no great confidence in what the Bundestag can accomplish in that cause.15

  Bismarck sent his impressions of Thun in a private letter to General Leopold von Gerlach:

  He is a mixture of rough-hewn bluntness, which can easily pass for honest openness, aristocratic nonchalance and slavic peasant cunning. He always has ‘no instructions’ and on account of ignorance of the business he seems to be dependent on his staff and entourage … Insincerity is the most striking feature of his character in his relationship to us … There isn’t a single man among the diplomats of any intellectual significance. Most of them are self-important pedants filled with little business, who take their letters patent and certificate of plenipotentiary power to bed with them and with whom one cannot have a conversation.16

  Though he might complain about his colleagues, in fact, Bismarck liked the job and nervously awaited official confirmation of his permanent appointment. It finally came in mid-August 1851. He had received the formal appointment but the ministry had without explanation cut 3,000 Reichsthaler from his salary and had provided no money for setting up his residence. He admitted that 18,000 Reichsthaler would be fine to live ‘well and elegantly’ but he would need to find a place for the family. He absolutely had to have a garden and a house with large rooms. In early September he found a fine house, 1,200 feet from the city gate, which had a large garden, and cost 4,500 Reichsthaler, which for Frankfurt was cheap. His letter to Johanna on 9 September concluded with the grumble: ‘It annoys me that his Excellency the Royal Bavarian Envoy keeps looking over my shoulder as I write.’17 He would not have had the annoyance, had he not ostentatiously and regularly done his private correspondence during boring speeches in the chamber. And he really did work hard. In a tone of amazement, he told Bernhard in a letter of his present routine:

  From 7 in the morning to dinner about 5 I seldom have an independent minute … Who would have believed it six months ago that I could afford 5000 thaler rent and employ a French chef in order to give dinners on the King’s birthday. I can get used to anything but Johanna will find it hard to get accustomed to the pointed and cold contacts in this sort of world.18

  Bismarck used the time in Frankfurt for other purposes. He continued to travel to Berlin to take his seat in the Prussian Lower House of Parliament. His ruthless and relentless ambition came out in a constant stream of private letters to General Leopold von Gerlach on domestic Prussian matters which he hoped the General would discuss during his daily chat over coffee and cake with the King. The private talk between the King and his General Adjutant made Leopold von Gerlach the most powerful subject in the kingdom. Bismarck’s actual superior as Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs was Otto Theodor Freiherr von Manteuffel (1805–82), a dry, reactionary but highly competent civil servant. Manteuffel had inherited his job when General Count Brandenburg suddenly died on 6 November 1850, in the midst of the crisis with Austria. He had courageously carried the government through the ‘shame of Olmütz’ and had been shrewd enough to accept the camarilla’s pressure to appoint Bismarck as ambassador to the newly reconstituted Bund. During his years in an ambassadorial capacity, Bismarck corresponded regularly around and behind the back of the Minister, his formal chief. Active disloyalty to Manteuffel seems not to have deterred him. By 1853 this double game had become a system as a letter of 25 February 1853 to Leopold von Gerlach makes clear. Manteuffel had requested that Bismarck submit two formal ambassadorial reports monthly on the first and fifteenth of every month. Manteuffel had not made his name as a financial expert for nothing. Bismarck offered to send his dispatches—but first to von Gerlach:


  I will send you these as originals with a plea to send them right back via Cologne and commend this indiscretion of mine to your most careful precautions since any discovery of this would have a disturbing effect on my relationship to Manteuffel. That would be not only officially but personally disagreeable since I have a sincere affection for his person and would be ashamed if he were to think that I played him false, even if it were, as here, without foundation.19

  The sheer effrontery of Bismarck in claiming that he had not played false with Manteuffel when he so obviously had, seems not to have upset the recipient. That the very pious, very Christian, very ‘born again’ General Leopold von Gerlach accepted the offer shows that camarilla needs trumped Christian morality. Gerlach overlooked a contemptible betrayal by Bismarck of his duty as diplomat toward his chief and an act of gross disloyalty personally to Otto von Manteuffel, who had helped to arrange his appointment. Gerlach’s connivance in duping the Minister-President suggests that life in the camarilla had corrupted his ethical sensibilities.

  Early in 1852, Bismarck wrote to Leopold von Gerlach and described himself as, ‘your diplomatic adopted child’.20 Johannes Willms compares this and the dozens and dozens of letters which Bismarck addressed to his ‘dear Patron and Friend’ to ‘finger exercises, thought games, which offer fascinating insights into the way his political understanding and knowledge of the European constellations of power grew by leaps and bounds’.21 Many have the quality of sketches but I see them as much more the pupil showing the master how brilliantly he can describe realities, people, places, conflicts. He also makes certain week by week that his ideas, his energy, and his imagination would flow through the ‘dear Patron and Friend’ to the King.