In the meeting today of the State Ministry the chair was taken by State Minister von Bismarck-Schönhausen, who gave an account of the negotiations which had led to his nomination as a State Minister and also expressed his regrets at the departure of the two State Ministers von Bernstorff and von der Heydt.13
This was not a cabinet which Bismarck had chosen; ministerial nomination remained the prerogative of the King. In time Bismarck’s growing dominance of affairs gave him influence but never control over the State Ministry’s personnel.
Bismarck wrote to his wife on 7 October that he was having trouble getting used to ‘life in the shop window’, which he found ‘rather uncomfortable and that he ate every day at the good Roons’.14 Presumably the new Minister-President walked, unaccompanied by a security detail, from his temporary office to the Roons’ apartment each evening. Pflanze describes the modest surroundings in which the new Minister-President had his office:
In 1862 he moved into the narrow two-story building at Wilhelmstrasse 76 that housed the foreign ministry. Constructed at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a private home, it was, inside and out, the least pretentious building in the Wilhelmstrasse. Bismarck often made fun of its plainness, but instigated no changes. On the first floor were the offices and cubicles of the counsellors and clerks of the foreign office, and on the second were the minister’s office, reception rooms and private quarters of the Bismarck family. In the rear was an extensive private garden shaded by old trees where the chancellor frequently walked. Visitors were astonished at the simplicity of their reception. No porter in dress uniform with ‘Cerebus demeanour’ guarded the portals. ‘One must ring just as one does at the homes of ordinary mortals’. In the antechambers were no lackeys in gold and silver of the kind favoured by diplomats and ministers. Bismarck received his visitors in a plain, sparsely furnished office of medium size dominated by a large mahogany desk. ‘No provincial prefect in France would have been satisfied with such modest surroundings’.15
This modesty and absence of show continued to mark the Bismarcks throughout their lives. Visitors could not believe how simple and unpretentious their habits were. Show and possession never mattered to Bismarck. He worried about money and expenses all his life but spent as little possible on himself. Johanna shared these puritanical attitudes. As Holstein unkindly put it, ‘Princess Bismarck [Johanna], although she looked like a cook all her life, had not the slightest idea of how to cook or at any rate how to give dinner parties.’16
Immanuel Hegel, who worked in the Foreign Ministry, recalled his first impressions of Bismarck as a boss:
all of us had the impression when he took office that he regarded us with mistrustful eyes, speculating whether we had been bought or were otherwise under someone else’s influence. Once he became convinced that we who worked in the cabinet secretariat were all honest people and good Prussians, we enjoyed his confidence. Still, we were just instruments for his will. There was no room for a pleasant relationship … Whenever I entered to deliver an oral report, I gathered all my wits firmly together, in order to be equal to anything unexpected. A relaxed, self-satisfied air was not appropriate with him, for one was in that case in danger of being bypassed or run over.17
That too would not change over the years. Bismarck worked at a very intense level and expected no less from the staff. Neither clerks nor cabinet officers could expect thanks and almost none got any. In 1884 Lothar Bucher observed bitterly, ‘I have worked under him now for twenty years, and yet he has only once (during the constitutional conflict) told me that something I wrote (a newspaper article) was good; and yet I believe I have written many better ones.’18 And in spite of the way Bismarck treated them, his immediate staff worshipped him, as Albrecht von Stosch wrote to his friend von Normann after his first visit to the Foreign Ministry:
I arrived between 11 and 12 in the morning. I was told that he was still sleeping. He had worked through the night until morning. The gentlemen of the Foreign Office speak of their chief with a holy awe, as believers do about the Prophet. It sounded really odd. After an hour he received me. He was in his dressing gown but endlessly polite and charming, as he heard from whom I had come.19
Nor was he kinder to his cabinet colleagues and in his memoirs he devotes an entire chapter to the members of his first cabinet in which hardly anyone escapes his scorn. Fritz Count zu Eulenburg (1815–81), who served him for more than fourteen years, gets just about the best report which reads like this:
Eulenburg was indolent and fond of pleasure, but on the other hand he was judicious and ready, and if as Minister of the Interior he should by-and-by be called upon to stand foremost in the breach, the need of defending himself and returning the blows which he received would spur him into activity … when he was in the mood for work, he was an able coadjutor, and he was always a well bred gentleman, though not entirely devoid of jealousy and touchiness in regard to me. When he was called upon for more continuous, more self-denying, more strenuous exertions than ordinary, he would fall a prey to nervous disorders.20
Another unfortunate aspect of Eulenburg’s character was his tolerance of Jewish liberals, as Bismarck wrote furiously to Roon on 1 March 1863. Eulenburg was
unwilling to burn all his bridges … Noah, Wolfsheim, Jacobi and the other scoundrels with or without foreskin will betray him and leave him in the lurch. You, I and Bodelschwingh are the most deeply involved in this business, and I would not want to go on living if we suffer a fiasco out of impotence.21
The others get poor marks: the Minister of Commerce Itzenplitz (Count Heinrich Friedrich August von Itzenplitz (1799–1883)) was ‘unfit … lacked energy’; the Minister of Agriculture von Selchow, who served in the cabinet for a decade (Werner Ludolph Erdmann von Selchow (1806–84)) was ‘unequal to the demands of office’; the Minister of Religion Heinrich von Mühler (1813–74) was ‘influenced by the energy and amateur participation in affairs of his clever and, when she saw fit, amiable wife’; the Minister of Justice, Leopold Graf zur Lippe-Biesterfeld-Weißenfeld (1815–89) and his ‘supercilious air of superiority … gave offence in parliament and to his colleagues’.22 Bismarck omits the fact that he sacrificed Count zur Lippe, the most reactionary (and that is saying something!) of all the members of the ‘conflict’ ministry to the Liberals in the Landtag when in 1866 Bismarck decided to turn 180 degrees and make peace with them. Count zur Lippe did not welcome this form of dismissal and spent the rest of his life as one of Bismarck’s most implacable foes. Cabinet officers, no matter how useful, belonged, as did all those who worked for Bismarck, to a group of collaborators who might fairly be labelled as ‘use and discard’.
In foreign affairs, Bismarck confronted the Austrian ambassador, Count Karolyi, on 4 December 1862, as he put it in his memoirs:
I had openly shown my hand to Count Karolyi, with whom I was on confidential terms. I said to him: ‘Our relations must become either better or worse than they now are. I am prepared for a joint attempt to improve them. If it fails through your refusal, do not reckon on our allowing ourselves to be bound by the friendly phrases of the Diet. You will have to deal with us as one of the Great Powers of Europe.’23
Nobody in the Austrian Foreign Ministry expected anything other than the uncomfortable mix of threats and blandishments from Bismarck, and, of course, nobody trusted him.
On 14 January 1863 the new Landtag session opened and Bismarck continued his policy of dramatic confrontation and provocation. He rejected Liberal claims that he was governing by unconstitutional procedures:
Whatever the constitution grants you as rights, you shall receive in full; anything that you demand beyond that, we shall refuse … The Prussia monarchy has not yet fulfilled its mission. It is not yet ready to become a purely ornamental jewel in your constitutional structure, nor yet ripe to be inserted as a dead piece of machinery in the mechanism of a parliamentary regime.24
He announced that in a case of conflict between the Crown and parliament—a matter on which t
he constitution left a ‘hole’—residual powers remained with the Crown. Hence the Crown had a perfect right to carry on the business of government, to collect taxes and make expenditures, even if the legislature refused to approve such acts. This theory, which has come to be called the ‘theory of the hole in the constitution’ or in German Lückentheorie, gave Bismarck the confidence to push on with his almost certainly unconstitutional activities.
A week later, he startled the ‘narrower council’ of the Bund by having Usedom read a statement announcing that the Prussian government favoured a ‘German parliament’:
The German nation can find a competent organ through which to influence the course of common affairs only in a representative body chosen directly by the people of each confederate state according to its population.25
This, the first occasion when Bismarck reached for the ‘people’ as a weapon against the Princes, shows how his complete absence of fixed principle allowed him a flexibility denied to his opponents. The small German states feared universal suffrage more than anything else, for it would simply whip away their legitimacy. If the people spoke, they would not cry aloud to preserve the sovereignty of Reuss Elder Line or Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen about which, for the most part, they were indifferent, if not overtly hostile. Even solid states like Catholic Bavaria or the Kingdom of Saxony would not easily be able to resist the German people in their demand for unity. Bismarck had seen, as we noticed in his correspondence with Leopold von Gerlach, that the ‘people’ could be persuaded to vote for the King against the posturing of the liberal middle classes or the presumptions of the smaller princes.
A different people caused the first international crisis of his tenure of office. On 21 January 1863 a revolt against Russian rule broke out in Russian Poland. Bismarck immediately asked the army to mobilize four army corps in Prussian Poland, though the Poles under the King of Prussia had remained quiet. Bismarck, who knew the Russian scene and the actors intimately, also understood that the ‘reform’ party at court favoured constitutional rights for the Poles. It was, as he put it, ‘simple common sense’ to strengthen the reactionaries and to ensure that the Russian Empire did not ‘fall into the possession of our enemies, whom we might discern in the Poles, the philo-Polish Russians, and, ultimately, probably in the French’.26 The Austrians, who like the Prussians ruled a substantial part of historic Poland, had joined with the British and French to propose a new constitutional arrangement for the Poles. Bismarck, who would have done the opposite out of anti-Austrian calculations, wasted no time in supporting the militants at the Tsarist court and sent General von Alvensleben to arrange an agreement on joint action against Polish rebels. On 8 February Alvensleben and the Tsar concluded a military convention which allowed both Powers to cross the borders of the other in hot pursuit of Polish armed units. Whether Alvensleben exceeded his brief cannot be established and for Bismarck it did not matter. As he wrote,
The Prussian policy embodied in the military convention concluded by General Gustav von Alvensleben in February 1863 had a diplomatic rather than a military significance. It stood for the victory in the Russian cabinet of Prussian over Polish policy, the latter represented by Gortchakoff, Grand Duke Constantine, Wielopolski, and other influential people.27
Nor did it matter that the Western Powers put pressure on the Prussian government not to ratify it and that the Convention never came into effect. Pflanze argues that it was ‘a rare lapse of judgement’ by Bismarck and ‘a bad mistake’ to have made the agreement,28 because it got Napoleon III off the horns of a dilemma between his dynasty’s historic commitment to Polish independence and his need for a Russian alliance; in my view that was a small price to pay for the certainty that Russia would stay neutral in a Prussian–Austrian final reckoning. Bismarck’s immediate support for the reactionary Russian party at court had the further useful aspect that it reinforced his reputation as a latter-day Polignac.
On 27 January 1863 Robert Lucius von Ballhausen (1835–1914), who later became one of Bismarck’s closest collaborators and one of the sharpest observers of the great man, attended a debate in the Prussian Landtag and got his first look at the new Minister-President:
He still wore civilian clothes then, his full moustache was still red-blond as was the thinning hair on his head. His tall broad shouldered figure seemed at the minister’s table mighty and impressive, whereas a certain casualness in stance, movement and speech had something provocative about it. He kept his right hand in the pocket of his light-coloured trousers and reminded me of the ‘crowing second’ at the Heidelberg duelling fraternities. He already had a certain way in which in hesitant sentences he seemed to search for words and always found the most penetrating and showed his knack for sharp crushing responses. He looked to me very ‘junkerish’, and had the gruffness of the old corps student, especially his manner of good-naturedly pumping malice into his excited opponents. That was the stormy session in which he developed the idea the state would and could live without a budget because it had to. That aroused the fury of the members, and Count Schwerin-Putzar, then leader of the opposition, a square, rather peasantish figure, who looked like a decent chap, accused Bismarck of developing the principle ‘that power takes precedence over justice.’29
This posture and attitude had been typical of Bismarck from his first speech in the United Diet of 1847 when he had caused uproar, treated the members with disdain, and pulled a newspaper from his pocket. The ‘conflict ministry’ had found a perfect ‘conflict Minister-President’ or, more accurately, Bismarck played that role with his accustomed adroitness. His defence of the Alvensleben Convention—universally condemned by liberals all over Europe—shows him at his impudent best.
The previous speaker (Henrich von Sybel) observed that I have defended my views today with less than normal certainty. I would regret it most sincerely if the opinion spread that I had in some way seen my opinions as doubtful. I see myself compelled by the statement to make the following declaration, that I have been ill for four days and today against the will of my doctor appear before you because I could not bear to forgo the delights of these deliberations (laughter) … I have often noticed the phenomenon in the press that when the newspapers report a new, hitherto unknown and surprising story they usually add the phrase ‘as is well known’ such and such is the case. I believe that the previous speaker finds himself in the same position when he says that opinion of Europe on the Convention is absolutely unanimous. The opinion of Europe cannot be unanimous about something of which it knows nothing.30
By the end of March, Bismarck had survived six months and opinions about him had now begun to harden. Ludwig von Gerlach welcomed Bismarck’s performance with relief, as he wrote to Hans von Kleist:
Have we ever had such a man at the top? Bismarck has exceeded my expectations. So much calm firmness I had not foreseen. Therefore Bismarck for ever! [English in orginal] Against the whole world and abroad!31
Bismarck’s own reaction to his first half-year in office comes out in a letter to his old Göttingen friend, John Motley. On his 48th birthday, 1 April 1863, he wrote to Motley that
I never dreamed that in my riper years I would be forced to practise so unworthy a profession as that of parliamentary minister. As an ambassador, although a civil servant, I maintained the feeling that I was a gentleman … As a minister I am a helot. The deputies are not dumb in general; that is not the right expression. Looked at individually these people are in part very shrewd, mostly educated, regular German university culture … as soon as they assemble in corpore, they are dumb in the mass, though individually intelligent. [The letter continues in English—JS]These drops of my own ink will show you at least that my thoughts, when left alone, readily turn to you. I never pass by old Logier’s house in the Friedrichstrasse without looking up at the windows that used to be ornamented by a pair of red slippers sustained on the wall by the feet of a gentleman sitting in the Yankee way, his head below and out of sight. I then gratify my memory with remembr
ance of ‘good old colony times, when we were roguish chaps’. Poor Flesh (Graf Hermann Keyserlingk) is travelling with his daughter. I do not know where in this moment. My wife is much obliged for the kind remembrance, and also the children … Deine Hand sieht aus wie Krähenfüsse ist aber sehr leserlich, meine auch? (your handwriting looks like crow’s feet but is very readable. Is mine?)32
Motley had in the meantime become US Ambassador to Vienna and at the end of May 1863 he wrote to Lady William Russell, the formidable mother of the future British ambassador in Berlin, Odo Russell, about his old college friend:
I am just now much interested in watching the set to between Crown and Parliament in Berlin. By the way, Bismarck Schönhausen is one of my oldest and most intimate friends. We lived together almost in the same rooms for two years—some ages ago when we were both juvenes imberbes, and have renewed our friendship since. He is a man of great talent, and most undaunted courage. He is the most abused man by the English newspapers I believe just now going, and I like him the better for that. Don’t believe a word of all the rubbish you read. He is a frank reactionaire and makes no secret about it. Supports the King in his view that the House of Commons majority is not the Prussian form of government, whatever may be the case in England … I am a great Liberal myself, but I believe that Prussia is by the necessary conditions of its existence a military monarchy, and when it ceases to be that, it is nothing. You as a despot ought to sympathize with Bismarck.33
Bismarck: A Life Page 26
