Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  On 25 June 1858, the day after Roon was initiated as a Knight of the Order of St John, Prince William summoned him to a private audience and asked for his ‘thoughts and plans in writing’ for army reform. The Regent wanted Roon to make suggestions for a more efficient management of the recruitment and personnel procedures. In principle, every adult male was subject to military service; in practice a small number actually served as recruits for two years. Recruitment in the 1850s stood at about 40,000 per year. A better army meant more recruits, trained better and serving for longer. It also meant doing something serious about the Landwehr, the local militias, who served seven-year terms and could re-enlist for another seven.

  Roon submitted his Bemerkungen und Entwürfe zur vaterländischen Heeresverfassung (Notes and Drafts for a Structure for an Army for the Fatherland) on 18 July 1858.110 Roon began his survey by asserting categorically that

  1. The Landwehr is a politically false institution, because it no longer impresses foreigners and for foreign and domestic politics is of doubtful significance;

  2. The Landwehr is at the same time a militarily false and weak institution because it lacks

  a) a genuine, firm soldierly spirit and

  b) a secure disciplinary control without which no reliable military organization can be conceived.

  A reconstruction must, therefore, occur in that:

  1. a tight fusion of the Landwehr with the Line units takes place and that

  2. the lack of suitable leadership be remedied.111

  Roon argued that three-year service was essential and that the intake must be greater.

  The former Landwehr ‘first mobilization’ must be completely incorporated into the line units in peacetime … If one wishes, the name ‘Landwehr’ can be preserved. Indeed, the whole army could be called ‘Landwehr’ if that were preferable.112

  Ultimately the plan foresaw an annual recruitment of 63,000 men with an eight-year military obligation, three of which were to be active and five in the active reserve. The new Prussian army would have at any time an instant force of over 300,000 fully trained troops, as opposed to the present slack system which could at most generate some 200,000 indifferently prepared soldiers.

  The scheme was very radical and not only in its sharp expansion of the army, but also because the Landwehr represented two important principles, which Roon utterly rejected. The right to bear arms had always been the sign of the free man. That faith found expression in the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, ratified on 15 December 1791, which makes it absolutely clear that the free citizen has a right to bear arms:

  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.113

  Prussia was not a free state. It had no citizens, only subjects. Neither the Regent nor his military adviser intended to alter that. Hence Roon called the Landwehr a ‘politically false’ institution, in that it gave its soldiers ideas beyond their station. It was false in a second sense because it went back to the ‘people’s rising’ of 1813 to 1815, which had for the first time enlisted volunteer units to fight alongside the Royal Prussian Army. The legend of the heroic young men fighting in their stylish black uniforms in a war for freedom comforted a bourgeoisie who could not get commissions in the proper army and who claimed their share of the patriotic War of Liberation. Bismarck had outraged precisely those sentiments by his very first speech in the Prussian United Diet of 1847 when he rejected the idea that there had been a War of Liberation at all. To incorporate the ‘free’ militia into the traditional Prussian army’s Kadavergehorsam (obedience of the corpse) attacked the entire self-image of the liberal middle classes. The financial costs would be high and the Prussian Landtag was unlikely to agree to them.

  That Prussia could easily afford such costs had not yet entirely penetrated the consciousness of the tax-paying classes. The Customs Union or Zollverein, which Prussia founded in 1819, had become a powerful internal market, from which Austria had been excluded. In the 1860s Prussia accounted for nine-tenths of all the pig iron and coal produced inside the Zollverein, two-thirds of the iron ore, and almost all the steel and zinc.114 Less evident but at least as important was the revolution in education that had spread through Prussia from 1815 to the 1860s. In 1833 Victor Cousin, French minister of education, called Prussia ‘the land of the barracks and the school room’. In the 1840s, Horace Mann, the famous American educational reformer, toured Prussian schools and noted how free they were:

  Though I saw hundreds of schools and … tens of thousands of pupils I never saw one child undergoing punishment for misconduct. I never saw one child in tears from having been punished or from fear of being punished.115

  Literacy rates in Prussia in 1850 averaged about 85 per cent, a standard of literacy consisting of both reading and writing skills, whereas in France reading only amounted to 61 per cent and in England reading and writing only reached 52 per cent of the population.116

  The educated workforce found employment in industries which had begun to exploit science and technology. The Prussian universities turned out scientific pioneers and the system of technical colleges trained generations of engineers who could apply the science to industry. The German university with its doctorates, seminars, research agendas and the technical colleges pushed Germany farther ahead in the struggle for dominance in Europe.

  Friedrich Engels, who returned to Prussia for the first time a generation after the Revolution of 1848, was astonished by the change.

  Whoever last saw the Prussian Rhineland, Westphalia, the kingdom of Saxony, upper Silesia, Berlin and the seaports in 1849 found them unrecognizable in 1864. Everywhere machines and steam-power had spread. Steamships gradually replaced sail-ships, first in the coastal trade, then in maritime commerce. The railways multiplied in length many times. In the dockyards, collieries, and iron works there prevailed an activity of the kind the ponderous German had previously thought himself incapable.117

  As Albrecht von Roon drafted his memorandum for the Regent in July 1858, the Kingdom of Prussia presented a paradox. Frederick the Great still provided the model. The old Frederician absolute monarchy was there in spirit, modified a little by the Constitution of 1850. The Prussian aristocracy still monopolized power in the army and civil service, while society had begun the rapid modernization that accompanies very sudden industrialization. It brought with it the rise of a wealthy middle class and a large industrial working class that demanded more representation and genuine parliamentary politics. Prussia remained Frederick the Great’s military state but one with huge factories, big cities, and advanced technology. Yet Roon’s army had not changed one iota. In 1862, 85 per cent of cadets entering the Prussian army came from ‘old Prussian’ territories and 79 per cent came from traditional Prussian families (officers, civil servants, and landowners). In the same period, while 35 per cent of the officer corps was bourgeois, the upper ranks were resolutely aristocratic with 86 per cent of all colonels and generals from the nobility.118 In other words, Frederick’s aristocracy still ruled Prussia but the Prussia they ruled had become utterly different. This paradox framed the careers of Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke. Bismarck’s success, if that is the word, lay in his preservation of that paradox to the end of the nineteenth century.

  6

  Power

  Bismarck’s position in 1859 depressed him. Though he had not been loyal to Minister-President Otto Freiherr von Manteuffel, Manteuffel had been good to him. Now both the King and Manteuffel had left the stage, the King through illness and Manteuffel through a punctilious sense of duty. In order to give the Regent a free hand, Manteuffel and his ministry tendered their resignations as a group and the Regent accepted them on 6 November 1858. Manteuffel refused the title of count and withdrew to his estate.1 With the change of Minister President and Foreign Minister, Bismarck heard a rumour that he was to be transferred to St Petersburg, which he regarded—n
ot entirely without grounds—as an attempt to put him, literally, out in the cold. It says something about Bismarck’s effrontery or the approachability of Prussian monarchs that Bismarck ‘betook himself’—his exact words in A. J. Russell’s translation—to the Regent and requested an audience. In it he protested that nobody could replace him. He had done eight years of service in Frankfurt and had got to know everybody who mattered. His successor, von Usedom, was a cretin with an impossible wife and for that matter the entire cabinet of the ‘New Era’ lacked distinction. As he put it to the Regent,

  After I had expressed myself concerning the post at the Federal Diet, I passed on to the general situation and said: ‘Your Royal Highness has not a single statesman-like intellect in the whole ministry, nothing but mediocrities and limited brains.’

  The Regent.—‘Do you consider Bonin’s a limited brain?’

  I.—‘By no means; but he cannot keep a drawer in order, much less a ministry. And Schleinitz is a courtier, but no statesman.’

  The Regent (irritably).—‘Do you perchance take me for a sluggard? I will be my own Foreign Minister and Minister of War; that I comprehend.’

  I apologized, and said: ‘At the present day the most capable provincial president cannot administer his district without an intelligent district secretary, and will always rely upon such a one; the Prussian monarchy requires the analogue in a much higher degree. Without intelligent ministers your Royal Highness will find no satisfaction in the result.’2

  Whether Bismarck actually said all that we cannot know. The conversation in question took place thirty-five years before Bismarck wrote his memoirs. Had he taken notes at the time? Yet the text itself still startles me. The idea that a 43-year-old ambassador could slander the entire cabinet and insult the Regent with impunity suggests either that Bismarck could, and did, get away with anything or that the Royal Prussian Court practised a tolerance rather unusual among monarchs. Nobody would have dared to say anything like that to Queen Victoria or Napoleon III.

  Bismarck’s documents from the time are more modest. He wrote to Johanna in mid-January 1859 that he had been well received at court by the Prince-Regent and had dined with Hans (von Kleist-Retzow), Oscar (von Arnim, brother-in-law), Alexander von Below-Hohendorf, Moritz von Blanckenburg, Wagener, Eberhard Count zu Stolberg, Somnitz, etc. He was likely to remain in Berlin until 24 January and had asked the Regent to be allowed to remain in his present post at Frankfurt.3 The decision went the other way. On 29 January 1859 Bismarck was named by the Regent the Prussian envoy to the court of Tsar Alexander II.4 Rather gloomily Bismarck returned to Frankfurt to arrange his affairs and organize the move.

  Roon was also in a bad mood. He had run into hostility from the new Minister of War, Eduard von Bonin, who was ten years older than he and incomparably more distinguished as a field commander. Von Bonin had his own ideas about the fusion of the Line and the Landwehr and had not been impressed by Roon’s memorandum. On 9 January 1859 Roon wrote to Anna that the new minister intended to shove the project to one side as soon as he could.5 The next day, he dined with the Prince Regent and afterwards the Princess Augusta asked him to stay a while and report to her on the reform project and the meeting of 22 December.

  She discussed my present assignment and sought to cheer me up. I ought not to lose heart. Matters of such importance must be pursued with the greatest eagerness and tenacity … In reply to my remark that the Prince only had to order the changes, she replied evasively. The Prince had been overwhelmed with projects and proposals and his task ought not to be made more difficult if those presenting reports are annoyed or become peevish. In any case it must be obvious that every thing would be better done if the agent carrying it out were convinced of its utility and with that she let me leave.6

  It cannot have been easy to remain cheerful when the next day Minister von Bonin dismissed him and the project with contempt. Roon wrote angrily to Anna that Bonin had said:

  He really had no time, could not occupy himself with the memorandum, which he had just received and not yet read, had not had time to think it through. He babbled on impatiently like a small boy.7

  Two days later the Regent called a cabinet meeting at which the military reform project appeared on the agenda. Roon had been invited to join the meeting at the end and heard von Bonin announce in the name of the Cabinet that Roon had been named to chair a commission to study the feasibility of the reform proposal. It all sounded very nice but Roon remained sceptical. He was convinced that von Bonin intended to sabotage the reforms by burying them in the commission and that ‘all such commissions threaten to fail on the issue’.8

  Roon’s fate and that of Bismarck were, in fact, being decided in a different part of the world. On 29 January 1859 a Franco-Piedmontese treaty, ratified by both parties, largely codified the terms agreed between Napoleon III and Count Cavour, the Piedmontese Prime Minister, at Plombières in 1858: in the event of an Austro-Piedmontese war in Italy resulting from Austrian aggression, France would join Piedmont in an effort to drive the Austrians from Italy and establish a Kingdom of Upper Italy under the House of Savoy. A few days later, on 4 February 1859, Napoleon published a pamphlet, ‘L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie’, in which the nephew of the great Napoleon set out his agenda for following in his predecessor’s footsteps. He too would liberate Italy and reduce the power of the reactionary Habsburg Empire. This bold attack on the international order of mid-century Europe would set off tremors that would lift both Roon and Bismarck to power and create the conditions in which Germany too could be unified.

  Bismarck had reason to be gloomy as he closed the house in Frankfurt and prepared to hand over the post to Guido Usedom. Before he left, he went to dinner at the sumptuous home of Mayer Carl von Rothschild (1820–86), the head of the Rothschild bank in the family’s home city of Frankfurt. He wrote enthusiastically about the experience in a letter to Johanna: ‘a real, old Jew haggler (Schacherjude) tons of silver, golden spoons and forks.’9 The dinner had long-term consequences since, on Meyer Carl’s recommendation, Bismarck appointed Gerson Bleichröder, a banker in Berlin, who operated as a Rothschild correspondent, to be his private banker and handle his affairs while he was away in St Petersburg.10 The relationship lasted until Bleichröder’s death in 1891 and made a great deal of money for Bismarck. What it did for Bleichröder to be known as ‘Bismarck’s banker’ can easily be imagined and will be described in some detail later in this book.

  Bismarck detested moving and even more so when things in remote St Petersburg were so difficult and expensive. On 25 February Bismarck wrote to Karl Freiherr von Werther (1809–82), his predecessor in Russia, about furniture at the St Petersburg residence, which Werther quite naturally wanted to sell. ‘What I am supposed to do with a big empty house for the six months until my wife arrives?’ Bismarck decided to go to a hotel for the first few months.11 As he complained to brother Bernhard, the move to Petersburg was going to be very expensive. Yes, he had a grand new salary of 33,000 thaler ‘with which under normal circumstances one could live quite comfortably’, but Werther had paid 6,400 without furniture for the ambassadorial residence in St Petersburg, a lot more than the 4,500 he was paying in Frankfurt. The Foreign Ministry had promised to give him 3,000 for the move but he reckoned that even with such a subsidy he would in the end be 10,000 thaler out of pocket.12

  Bismarck left Frankfurt for good on 6 March 1859 and went to Berlin for what he hoped would be a few days. Ten days later, he wrote to Johanna:

  I am still here to my great irritation. I don’t know what I should do and what to answer to everybody about my departure. Saturday I had set as a date to leave but now there’s a letter from the Prince to the Tsar, which I am supposed to take which will not be ready until next week.13

  And then without warning, he suddenly had to depart:

  It has turned out exactly as I expected. After keeping me for 16 days without reason, it suddenly turned out yesterday at 5 that I should leave as soon as possibl
e, at the latest tonight. That I am not going to do and will leave tomorrow afternoon.14

  Bismarck’s journey from Berlin to St Petersburg reminds us of the difference between Bismarck’s world and ours. Though railroads had begun to spread and he could travel most of the first leg on the train to Königsberg, thereafter he had to travel in carriages of various kinds, which went from one post house or coach stop to the next. Late March brought heavy snow along the Baltic and Bismarck had to get out of the carriage and push at various points. When he finally reached St Petersburg, he wrote a long letter to his sister about the exhausting but exciting week it had taken to get from Königsberg to St Petersburg, a journey that now takes about an hour on a plane. I quote it at length:

  Day before yesterday early in the morning I arrived here at the Hotel Demidoff where I am warm and dry, but it was an effort to get this far. Hardly had we left Konigsberg eight days ago, when a lively snow storm began, and since that I have not seen the natural colour of the surface of the earth. Already at Insterburg, my courier coach took an hour to go one mile. In Wirballen I found a miserable coach whose interior was too small for my length, so I changed places with Engel [his valet—JS] and passed the whole journey in the outer-seat, which is forward and open. There was a small bench with an acute-angled back rest, so, that even apart from the cold which at night went down to minus 12 degrees, it made sleep impossible. I held out in this position from Friday to Monday evening and except for the first and last night on the train, I slept 3 hours in Kovno and 2 hours on a sofa in a station house. My skin peeled off in layers, when I arrived. The journey took so long because the fresh fallen snow covered the sleigh tracks. Several times we had to get out and walk because the eight horses of the carriage simply got stuck. The Düna was frozen but half a mile upstream, there was an open spot where we crossed. The Wilija had wind driven ice floes, the Niemen was open. From time to time we were short of horses, because all the post couriers took eight or ten and instead of the usual 3 or 4. I never had fewer than six and the carriage was not over-weight. Conducteur, Postilion and Fore-rider did their best so that I resisted the temptation to ruin the horses. Smooth hills were the worst obstacle, especially going down hill the four after-horses piled into each other in a tumble. Anyway it is all over and is fun to tell.15