Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

Two threats to Bismarck’s future emerged early in his Frankfurt years. A group of enemies of Manteuffel and Gerlach had formed in and outside the diplomatic service. In his memoirs, Bismarck describes them and their motives quite accurately:

  The party, or more correctly, coterie, subsequently named after Bethmann-Hollweg, found its original mainstay in Count Robert von der Goltz, a man of unusual competence and energy …22

  Robert von der Goltz always regarded himself as the natural choice as foreign minister and loathed Bismarck. Holstein records in his Memoirs a delightful moment in their rivalry:

  Bismarck was fond of relating how Goltz visited him in Frankfurt one day while he was still a free agent, just to inveigh against everybody and everything. As he left, Goltz had to cross the courtyard, where an extremely fierce watch-dog barked furiously at him. Bismarck, still under the influence of their conversation, called down from a window, ‘Goltz, don’t bite my dog’ …23

  The second threat arose directly from Bismarck’s personality. In March 1852 he got involved in a duel. The story is bizarre. Early on in Bismarck’s appointment to the Bund, Count Thun as President had pulled out a cigar and lit it during a session of the narrower Council. Only the President of the Federal Council, the Austrian envoy, had by custom the right to smoke in meetings. Bismarck in order to show the equal status of Prussia immediately lit up a cigar as well. He had told the story to Georg Freiherr von Vincke (1811–75), a deputy from Hagen in Westphalia in the Prussian lower house. Vincke, a fiery character, was widely regarded as the ‘greatest Prussian parliamentary orator’ of his generation and like Bismarck had been ‘a dashing swordsman’ as a student.24 Vincke loved to goad Bismarck. As Hermann von Petersdorff described him, ‘on his full, fleshy and sly face, surrounded by a bright red beard, there played a mocking smile. Self-confidence and ease of manner radiated from his body … Battle was his life’s element.’25 Bismarck explained the story to his mother-in-law. In a debate in the Prussian Lower House,

  He [Vincke] accused me of lacking diplomatic discretion and said that so far my only achievement had been the ‘burning cigar’. He referred to an incident in the Bund Palace which I had recounted to him in private ‘under four eyes’ as something trivial but rather funny. I replied to him from the podium that his remark exceeded not only the boundaries of diplomatic discretion but even the normal discretion that one had a right to expect from every properly educated man. The next day through his second, Herr von Saucken-Julienfelde he sent me a challenge to a duel of four bullets. I accepted after Oscar’s proposal to use sabres had been rejected. Vincke asked for a 48 hour postponement which I agreed to. At 8 on the morning of the 25th [of March] we drove out to Tegel to a lovely spot on the lakeside. The weather was so beautiful and the birds sang so merrily that all sad thoughts disappeared as soon as I got there. I had forcibly to avoid thoughts of Johanna for fear of weakening. With me I had brought Arnim and Eberhard Stolberg and my brother, who looked very depressed, as witnesses … Bodelschwingh (a cousin of the minister’s and Vincke’s) served as neutral witness. He suggested that the challenge had been set too high and proposed that the duel be reduced to a shot each. Saucken speaking in Vincke’s name accepted that and further announced that they would be prepared to withdraw the challenge if I apologized for my remarks. Since I could not in good conscience do that, we both took our pistols, shot on the command of Bodelschwingh and both missed … Bodelschwingh shed tears … the reduction of the challenge annoyed me and I would have preferred to continue the fight. Since I was not the person insulted, I could say nothing. That was it; everybody shook hands.26

  The life of Otto von Bismarck might have come to an end on 25 March 1852, if Carl von Bodelschwingh had not lowered the stakes or Bismarck might have killed Vincke, which would have almost certainly damaged his career. Nothing happened. Bismarck survived, but it was a close thing.

  Bismarck continued to enjoy his position and in letters to his patron, Leopold von Gerlach, he admitted as much. In August 1852 Bismarck began a letter by writing, ‘I live here like God in Frankfurt’. Bismarck played with the original aphorism ‘to live like God in France’, a common German aphorism which means ‘I love it here’, by substituting Frank-furt for Frank-reich.27 (The editors of the Collected Works of Bismarck, with perfect German humourlessness, write: ‘so in the original—possibly a misprint’.)

  and this mixture of powdered wigs, railroads, country squire from Bockenheim [Bismarck lived at 40 Bockenheimer Allee—JS], diplomatic Republicanism, cameralist Federal Diet squabbling, suits me so well that in the whole world I would only change it for that post occupied by my All-Highest Lord if the entire Royal Family were to put me under unbearable pressure to accept.28

  In a letter to his sister, he mocked it by quoting the little verse by Heine: ‘O Bund, Du Hund, du bist nicht Gesund’ (O Bund! you hound, you are not sound) and predicted that ‘the little verse will soon become by unanimous vote the German national anthem.’29 While he made fun of the Bund, he also observed carefully the behaviour of the small states and concluded that Prussia would always be a greater threat to them than Austria and hence the little states would gather round the Habsburgs for security. A weak protector would be less inclined to gobble them up than a strong one, an assumption entirely justified by Bismarck’s later actions.

  On 2 December 1851 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the elected president of the Second French Republic, carried out a well-planned and bloodless coup d’état against the constitution of the Second Republic. The coup d’état changed the entire diplomatic situation in Europe. Without it Bismarck could never have unified Germany. Louis Napoleon was as much a prisoner of memory as the conservatives in Prussia. He had to re-create the empire of his uncle in order to fulfil the myth behind his election, in other words, as Article 1 of the new constitution asserted: ‘La Constitution reconnaît, confirme et garantit les grands principes proclamés en 1789, et qui sont la base du droit public des Français.’ So the great principles of the revolution—‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’—had to be asserted but denied at the same time. Above all, he needed the Imperial crown and on 7 November 1852 the Senate re-established the title of Emperor. The dictator became Napoléon III, and ceased to be called Louis-Napoléon. The next step for the Emperor Napoleon III would follow as surely as night follows day. He had to adopt a Napoleonic posture in foreign affairs and overturn the balance, which Austria had only just restored.

  With the emergence of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Bismarck’s subsequent career became possible. No other conceivable French ruler could have played so perfectly into Bismarck’s hands as Napoleon III. No other great state had a reason to destroy Austrian power in Europe, exactly the goal that Bismarck had come to Frankfurt to pursue. Bismarck’s reaction shows his unconventional and acute sense of political possibilities: he advocated an accommodation with the new Bonaparte to discomfit Austria and the small German princes. As early as January 1853 Bismarck wrote this to Leopold von Gerlach:

  I am convinced that it would be a great misfortune for Prussia if her government should enter into an alliance with France, but, even if we make no use of it, we ought never to remove from the consideration of our allies the possibility that under certain conditions we might choose this evil as the lesser of the two.30

  This argument had nothing to do with principle but with realities of power or the appearance of such realities. If Prussia gave the impression to the smaller German states that a deal between Berlin and Paris over their heads might be possible, they would suddenly and in an undignified rush head for Berlin to get assurances that nothing of theirs might have been promised to the French emperor. They would be good little German states and obey Prussia’s wishes. In fact, in the period from 1862 to 1870 that is precisely what Bismarck threatened to do and it had the anticipated pleasing effects. A potential alliance with Imperial France would alarm Austria and strengthen Prussia’s hand in the game. For Prussia, the enemy could only be Austria, as he wrote to Leopold von G
erlach in late 1853:

  Our politics have no other exercise room than Germany, not least because of the way we have grown and intertwined with it and Austria hopes desperately to use this fact for itself. There is no room for us both as long as Austria makes its claims. In the long run we cannot coexist with each other. We breathe the air out of each others’ mouths; one must yield or must be ‘yielded’ to the other. Until then we must be enemies. I regard that as an ‘un-ignorable’ fact (if you will pardon the word), however unwelcome it might be.31

  Courtesy required him to go to Vienna early in his tenure of office. He was presented to the Emperor and he met the new rulers of Austria, who took over after the sudden death of Prince Schwarzenberg on 5 April 1852. In his report to Prime Minister von Manteuffel he commented about the Jews who ran the country and who were, as always for Bismarck and most Junkers, a persistent nuisance:

  People indicated to me that the bearers of the hostile attitude to us, especially in trade matters, was the ‘Jew Clique’ which the late Prime Minister had elevated to power (Bach, Hock and Jewish newspaper writers, although Bach is not Jewish).32

  A new Austrian president of the Bundestag had arrived, the formidable scholar-soldier, orientalist, and travel writer, Anton Prokesch Count von Osten (1795–1876). His history of the Greek Revolt of 1821, his travel books, and multi-volume memoirs of his period in the Turkish Empire had made him famous throughout German-speaking Europe.33 Bismarck loathed him: ‘His military appearance, which he affects, is striking. He never appears other than buttoned up in uniform and even in meetings he never removes his sabre.’34 Metternich who had promoted him wrote of him: ‘I adore him, I love Prokesch but if you make him Sultan of Turkey, he would not be satisfied. He is eccentric and vain.’35 In his reply on 28 January 1853, Leopold von Gerlach expressed a less unfavourable view of Prokesch than Bismarck and insisted in opposition to Bismarck’s argument that ‘Bonaparte and Bonapartism is our worst enemy.’36 Nor could he accept that Austria must be the enemy. In a diary entry of 27 July 1853, he wrote:

  I have told Ludwig and others a thousand times the true nature of the Union is that Prussia has a singularly odd relationship to Germany and with it a claim to domination, independent of Austria … Just as important is the union of Prussia with Germany and in this union it must unite first with Austria.37

  This attitude to Austria did not please Bismarck but he would, in fact, do exactly that in the mid-1860s—ally with Austria against the German princes and then isolate Austria in order to cause a war.

  The emergence of a conflict in the Balkans suddenly changed the prospects of the ambitious young diplomat in Frankfurt. In 1853 the conservative alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria began to come apart, as Russia and France clashed over the right to act as protectors of the holy sites in Palestine. In May–June 1853 Turkey rejected the Russian claim to be protector of all Christians in the Turkish Empire. On 31 May 1853 a Russian army crossed the Pruth river and occupied the two Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. War broke out between Russia and Turkey in October 1853. This put the Habsburg Monarchy into a difficult dilemma. The presence of Russian troops on the lower Danube threatened the Monarchy, often called the Danubian monarchy, after the river that served it as central artery. Something had to be done to halt Russian advances. On the other hand, conservative politics had united the two courts from 1815 and Russian intervention to help the Habsburgs suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–9 had created a debt that the Russians regarded as self-evident.

  On 12 April 1852 Karl-Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein became Foreign Minister in place of Prince Schwarzenberg, whose death had removed the one leader of real stature in the post-Metternichian era. Boul was not that. The weakness of Russia tempted Buol to use the occasion to establish Austrian hegemony over the Balkans. The court circles and the Emperor had doubts and so Austrian policy managed to antagonize all parties without any substantial gain.

  Bismarck immediately began to urge Manteuffel to use Austrian weakness to expand Prussian power. ‘The great crises provide the weather for Prussia’s growth,’38 he wrote, and later in 1854 he urged King Frederick William IV to mobilize 200,000 troops in Upper Silesia where they could be used either against Austria or Russia.

  With 200,000 men your majesty would at this moment become the master of the entire European situation, would be able to dictate the peace and win for Prussia a worthy position in Germany.

  The King reacted with surprise: ‘A man of Napoleon’s sort can commit such acts of violence, I cannot.’39 Like Buol, the King found himself torn between his close family ties to the Tsar’s court (Nicholas I had married Frederick’s sister Charlotte), his loyalty to Austria, his emotional commitment to the conservative principles of the old Holy Alliance of 1815, and his own inability to act with decisiveness.

  The situation worsened as the Russo-Turkish War dragged on. Britain and France, together with Cavour’s Piedmont, formed an alliance of the Western states and Turkey against the Russian empire. Austria now looked to the Bund for support and Prussian-Austrian tension moved beyond clashes over cigars in the conference chamber to issues of war, and peace. On 22 March 1854 Prokesch-Osten, Austrian Ambassador to the Bund, wrote to Buol, the Austrian Foreign Secretary:

  I have never expected an honest game from the Prussian side and often ask myself whether we could not put together a coalition, and, when we have it, use it with help of the sea powers to reduce Prussia to a harmless size. We shall never get rid of this rival as long as it has its strength, and still less when it grows. Kaunitz’s policies aimed at the insolence of Frederick II, and the Prussia of today is nothing other than Frederick’s old state.40

  Hardly. The Prussia of 1854 had at its head a King who could not make up his mind. As the Tsar wrote contemptuously of him: ‘My dear Brother-in-Law goes to bed as a Russian and wakes up as an Englishman.’41 Bismarck was determined to use the crisis to strengthen Prussia’s international standing and that meant refusing to be drawn into an alliance with Austria. He also had to watch the manoeuvres of the smaller German states; as he wrote to Gerlach in April, the smaller German states

  want to secure their further existence by joining the stronger powers. In the last few years they went along with Prussia-Austria-Russia as long as they were united, with Austria-Russia as soon as their policies separated from the Prussian.42

  On 28 March 1854 France and Great Britain declared war on the Russian Empire and joined Turkey in its battle by sending naval units and ground troops to the eastern Mediterranean. On 5 April British troops arrived at Gallipoli. Against this background, on 20 April 1854, Prussia and Austria signed an offensive-defensive alliance, which gave Austria the backing to demand on 3 June 1854 that Russia evacuate the Danubian Principalities. A few days later, on 7 June, the Emperor Franz Josef and King Frederick William IV met in Teschen to coordinate policy. On 24 June 1854 the small and middle-sized German states acceded to the Austro-Prussian alliance. Bismarck opposed all of this, as he wrote to his brother on 10 May 1854:

  That at the sound of the first shot against the Russians we shall turn ourselves into the whipping boy for the Western Powers and let them dictate to us the terms of peace while we carry the main burden of war is as clear as a school arithmetic exercise.43

  A series of defeats shook Russian self-confidence and on 28 July the Russians withdrew behind the line of the Pruth River. The Western Powers had now assembled an amphibious operation and planned to land on the Black Sea coast. Bismarck breathed a sigh of relief, as he observed in a letter of 10 July to his brother:

  In grand politics, peace perspectives have begun to pop up. One seems to have calmed down in Vienna, or, rather, one no longer behaves with that impatience they believe they need to impress us.44

  On 8 August France, Britain, and Austria agreed to present the Russians with four points as the basis for peace negotiations. Russia was asked:

  (1) to abandon the protectorate over the Danubian Principalities;


  (2) to recognize the freedom of all shipping on the Danube;

  (3) to accept a revision of the Treaty of 13 July 1841;

  (4) to abandon the protectorate over subjects of the Supreme Porte.45

  On 2 December a Triple Alliance of France, Britain, and Austria was signed and the three Powers invited Prussia to join them. Bismarck wrote to Gerlach at once:

  The text of the Treaty of 2 December arrived the day before yesterday … I would absolutely not join the coalition, because everybody will see that we did it out of fear and conclude that the more they frighten us, the more they get from us. Decorum alone forbids it in my view … The moral is that in all German cabinets from the tiniest to the greatest, fear is the only thing that determines decisions; each is afraid of the other, all are afraid of France …46

  By the end of the month, Bismarck heard good news from Berlin, as he wrote to Leopold von Gerlach,

  Three days ago I got a letter from Manteuffel which made me very happy. He too thinks that we should not join the 2 December … As long as we show relaxed self-confidence, the others will have respect for us. As soon as we betray fear, they will use this ignoble weakness and try to increase and exploit it … In order to fill the Federal states with sufficient fear, as they have of Austria, we have to show ourselves capable, if others make us desperate, to join with France and even Liberalism. As long as we behave well, nobody takes us seriously and then all go where the threat is greater …47

  Here for the first time Bismarck shows an aspect of his technique: create fear and uncertainty in a crisis, so that opponents cannot be certain how Prussia will act, and be absolutely unscrupulous in the choice of means. Prussia can ally with any force or state if it needs to do so. These techniques, instrumental and unprincipled as they are, marked his diplomatic approach from the Crimean War to the moment he fell from power.