Lassalle and Bucher created a kind of think tank to work through the implications of the industrialization process and the emergence of a new class: the proletariat. Lassalle began a campaign of flamboyant lectures, designed to get himself arrested and to offer him, as in the Hatzfeldt case, a free public platform. Bucher had doubts about the theoretical soundness of his new partner, whose Hegelianism misled him, as he wrote to Bismarck, years later when he had changed sides and become Bismarck’s closest collaborator and journalistic assistant:
This error was not new to me. I had met it in other Hegelians and it can be explained by the essence of Hegelian philosophy which, as is well known, attempts to show a parallelism or an identity, between the development of concepts in pure thought (similar to algebra) and the appearances in nature and the events of history (similar to calculations with known quantities).59
Meanwhile, Lassalle attacked liberalism in his speeches as, for example, in one called ‘On the special relationship between the present historical period and the idea of the Arbeiterstand’, delivered at the Manual Workers’ Association of Oranienburg:
If we were all equally, equally shrewd, equally educated, and equally rich, the Idea would be considered as a comprehensive and moral one, but since we are not and cannot be, so the idea is not sufficient and leads in its consequences, therefore, to a deep immorality and to exploitation … You are the rock on which the church of the present will be built … From the high peaks of scientific knowledge, we can see the early morning red of a new day earlier than below in the turmoil of daily life. Have you ever watched the sun rise from the height of a mountain? A purple seam slowly turns colour and bloodies the distant horizon, proclaiming the coming of new light. Mist and clouds stir and move, ball themselves together and throw themselves against the dawning red, casting a shroud momentarily on the rays. But no power on earth can prevent the slow majestic rising of the sun, which an hour later all can see, brightly lighting and warming the firmament. What is an hour in the natural drama of each day, are the one or two decades in which the much more imposing drama of a world historical sunrise will occur?60
A few days later Lassalle made a speech to a Berlin District Citizens meeting, ‘Concerning the nature of constitutions’. What determined a constitution, he argued, was not the piece of paper but the power relationships that actually exist in a given country. Hence the Constitution of 1850 with its three-class voting and its special Articles 47 and 108 securing the separateness of the army reflected the realities of Prussian society:
The princes are much better served than you are. The servants of the princes are not fine talkers as the servants of the people often are, but they are practical men who have an instinct for what really matters … Constitutions are not originally questions of law but questions of power. Written constitutions only have value and last if they express the real power relations in society.61
Lassalle’s ideas attracted unusual enthusiasts. On 12 September 1862 General Albrecht von Roon quoted Lassalle in the Prussian Landtag: ‘According to his analysis of history, the main content of history is not only that between states but also within states there is nothing more than a struggle for power and the extension of power among the various individual factors.’62 By November 1862 Karl Eichler, a speaker at one of Lassalle’s Workers’ Meetings in Berlin, told the assembly that Bismarck was on the workers’ side. The meeting voted overwhelmingly to hold a workers’ congress in Leipzig.63 On 19 November 1862 Lassalle delivered the ‘What Now?’ speech in which he urged the Landtag to adopt a resolution that they would no longer meet until Bismarck restored their constitutional powers.64
These two themes—the illusions of liberalism and the reality of constitutions as expressions of power—reveal the same realism which we have seen again and again in Bismarck. Lassalle had one advantage which Bismarck lacked. He was a charismatic mass orator, probably the first in Prussian history and, at the same time, a fully paid-up romantic, bursting with romantic metaphors, images, and, unfortunately for Germany, romantic liaisons. In the midst of the campaign of stunning public lectures, clashes with the police and dramatic arrests, he wrote to Sophie Hatzfeldt:
My sister wants to marry me off. The girl is pretty, of good family, lively and cheerful, can keep her end up in society, but I don’t know how deep her education goes … I am very taken with her. She has a lovely body. She is witty and amusing, is quite (not wildly) in love with me … What chiefly keeps me back is the money side. If, as is likely, my money from the Gas Company comes to an end, my income in 1870 will be only about 1,500 thaler or 2,500 or so if my mother dies, I can’t keep a wife or children on that without gruesome economies.65
In May of 1863 Lassalle founded the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (the General German Workers’ Association) and spent most of 1863 in hectic travel among the branches, where he made exciting speeches to rather sceptical audiences of solid German working men. It was during this period, that Bismarck approached Lassalle and asked him to call. By 1864 Bismarck and Lassalle seem to have met regularly. On 13 January 1864 Lassalle wrote to Bismarck:
Excellency, Above all, I must accuse myself of having forgotten yesterday, to urge you to take to heart that the ability to vote must be conceded to all Germans. An immense means of power. The real ‘moral’ conquest of Germany! With respect to electoral techniques, since yesterday I have been through the history of the legislation on the French electoral system and there, to be sure, found not much useful material. I have in addition reflected further and am now in a position to be able to give your Excellency a magic recipe for preventing vote division and the crumbling of votes. I await the fixing of an evening from your Excellency. I plead strongly for an evening so that we will not be disturbed. I have much to discuss with your Excellency about election techniques and yet more on other matters and an undisturbed and exhaustive discussion is, given the urgency of the situation, an unavoidable need.66
On Saturday, 16 January 1864, Lassalle wrote again to Bismarck:
I would not press but external events press powerfully and thus I beg you to excuse my pressing. I wrote to you on Wednesday that I had found the desired ‘magic recipe’—a ‘magic recipe’ with most comprehensive effects. Our next discussion will finally be followed by the most decisive decisions and such decisions, I believe, can no longer be delayed, I shall allow myself to call on your Excellency tomorrow (Sunday at 8 ½). Should your Excellency be prevented at that hour, I would ask you to determine another time very soon for my visit.67
By 12 March 1864 Lassalle had begun to express these ideas in public. He had been arrested on a charge of high treason. He defended himself by citing Bismarck’s wish to impose universal suffrage:
I want not only to overthrow the constitution, but perhaps in a year or less it will be overthrown, and I shall have overthrown it … I therefore declare to you from this sacred place a year will not have passed before Herr von Bismarck will have played the role of Robert Peel and introduced universal and direct suffrage.68
At the height of his powers and influence, Lassalle got involved with his maddest romance with a young Roman catholic girl, Helene von Rocawitza, which ended in an utterly futile duel that Lassalle had provoked by his impossible behaviour. On 5 August 1864 Lassalle wrote to a friend, ‘Only this I know. I must have Helen—Workers Association, politics, science, jail all pale in my insides at the thought to reconquer Helen again.’69 The duel took place on 29 August 1864, and Ferdinand Lassalle died of his wounds on 31 August 1864. Marx, who treated Lassalle with a mixture of scorn and envy, as we have seen, and who called him in private correspondence ‘Baron Izzie’, wrote an informal obituary to Engels: ‘That could only have happened to Lassalle with his strange mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and playing the chevalier, that mixture was utterly his own.’70
But there is more to it than that. Serious students of the workers’ movement in Germany have over the last century and a half devoted much, if heretical, though
t to Lassalle as an alternative to Marx. Lassalle had qualities that Marx lacked—the charismatic skills of a mass leader—and his ideas centred on power and the state, two categories which Marx’s economic-social model almost entirely ignores. The state and its actors are simply elements of the superstructure. Marx makes that clear in the introduction to the 1867 edition of Das Kapital:
To avoid possible misunderstandings a word. I do not draw the figures of the capitalist or the landlord in a rosy light. But the issue only concerns persons insofar as they personify economic categories as bearers of particular class relations and interests. My standpoint, much less than any other, does not make individuals responsible for conditions of which they are social products, however much they imagine themselves to be above them, since my analysis conceives the formation of the economic structures of society as a natural historical process.71
This theoretical position had disastrous consequences for the German labour movement and for the history of humanity. It led the great German Social Democratic Party to view history as determined by economic forces over which neither they nor anybody else had control. They preached revolution because Marx’s laws showed that capitalism must destroy itself as a result of its ‘inner contradictions’. The Sozialdemokratische partei Deutschlands, the largest party in Bismarck’s empire by 1912, had no strategy for what Lassalle had seen clearly in his 1862 lectures—that political institutions matter, that constitutions rest on power relationships, and that human will can change things.
Lassalle played a unique role in Bismarck’s own life. He remained the only figure in Bismarck’s career whom he respected to the very end. In 1878, as Bismarck planned legislation to suppress the SPD, Lassalle’s ghost came back to haunt him. In July of 1878 the Berliner Freie Presse published every day for two weeks letters from Bucher to Lassalle, which very probably Sophie Countess Hatzfeldt had given to Leopold Schapira, the editor of the newspaper, to embarrass Bismarck and block the anti-Socialist Law which Bismarck intended to introduce. In the Reichstag, August Bebel, the leader of the parliamentary fraction of the SPD, challenged Bismarck on his dark past as a crypto-socialist and got an astonishing reply from the Reich Chancellor. Bismarck acknowledged quite openly that he had engaged in secret negotiations with Lassalle, and then added unprompted these words—unique to my knowledge in Bismarck’s remarks on his contemporaries:72
What he had was something that attracted me extraordinarily as a private person. He was one of the cleverest and most charming men whom I have known. He was ambitious in grand style … Lassalle was an energetic and witty man with whom it was very instructive to talk. Our conversations lasted for hours and I always regretted when they were over …73
This affectionate and unusual tribute to Lassalle calls into question the depth of Bismarck’s anti-Semitism. From his respect for Lassalle, his friendship with Ludwig Bamberger, and his admiration for Eduard Simon, we can deduce that, as in every other aspect of Bismarck’s hates and loves, no general statement can do justice to his mercurial likes and dislikes. Certainly he had the conventional anti-Semitism of his class and age, but as with Catholics or Socialists, his attitude to Jews reflected how interesting he found them or how useful. He hated Lasker and Windthorst less because one was Jewish and the other Catholic but because they opposed him successfully and became enemies.
There was another legacy of Bismarck’s relations with Lassalle that was almost as astonishing as Lassalle’s secret meetings. Lothar Bucher, journalist, socialist theoretician, and revolutionary, switched sides. On 15 August 1864, two weeks before Lassalle’s fatal duel, Bucher wrote to him with the following news:
Though I could hope for a favourable outcome, I had decided for reasons that are rather complicated and which should not be set out on paper, to seek another position and in fact, as quickly as possible … In eight days the whole thing was settled.74
Lothar Bucher had been employed since 1 January 1863 in the Wolff Telegraph Agency, where he was underpaid and unsatisfied. Christoph Studt offers various versions of how Bucher came to work for Bismarck. One came from Robert von Keudell who claimed the credit. According to Keudell, Bismarck said of the possibility that Bucher might work for him:
We all cook with water and most of what happens or will happen gets into the press. Take the case that he comes to us as a fanatical democrat, like a worm to bore its way into the state structure and to blow it up, he would soon see that he alone would be destroyed in the attempt. Let that possibility be. Such perfidy I cannot believe of him. Talk to him without asking for his confession of faith. What interests me is whether he will come or not.75
Arthur von Brauer (Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Arthur von Brauer (1845–1926), a Baden diplomat and politician, who also worked under Bismarck)76 denied that Keudell could have thought of it. The startling idea of the appointment of a former revolutionary in a conservative ministry, Brauer thought, ‘looks much more like what Bismarck might do than a Keudell’. The final variant involves a friend of Bucher’s approaching Count Eulenburg to ask if there were a chance for a convicted revolutionary to get a lawyer’s licence again and Eulenburg asked Bismarck, who replied ‘he is completely out of practice in the law, maybe there’s some way of using him in the Foreign Ministry’.77 Bismarck kept the appointment secret for a while and many, including the King, were deeply shocked. Bucher wrote to Bismarck; ‘Excellency knows my national standpoint which I would never deny. Bismarck: I know your national standpoint only too well but I need it for the conclusion of my policy and I will only give you work to carry out which moves in the spirit of your national efforts.’78
Bucher became a fixture in Bismarck’s staff from 1864 to his death. Holstein recalled working in the same office with Bucher during the Franco-Prussian war:
Bismarck regarded Bucher’s low status at Court as an advantage, because he knew that Bucher understood that it was Bismarck alone who kept him on. Because of this Prince Bismarck regarded him as his tool, and used him to carry out all kinds of strictly confidential and personal business … He only found fault with Bucher or criticized him to other people when he considered Bucher had not done a job properly. Bismarck never made Bucher’s personality and idiosyncrasies the subject of general merriment, as he so often did with Abeken … With his stunted body, his abnormally ugly face and unhealthy complexion, he had that partly timid, partly embittered, reserve of people, who have lost heart because they are social failures. This was combined with a strong interest in the opposite sex, which must have cost him many hours of misery … It so happened that during our last weeks in Versailles, in the big office in the Villa Jessé, I sat between Bucher and Wagener; the man who refused to pay taxes and the founder of the Kreuzzeitung, addressed each other in monosyllables. Bucher confided to me that that when he was obliged to flee in the winter of 1848, it was Wagener who signed the order for his arrest to be sent out over the telegraph. Bucher’s escape was entirely due to the fact that the telegraph system was not working that day.79
Late in August 1863 the King and Bismarck decided to confront the liberals again by calling yet another ‘conflict election’ and on 2 September 1863, the Landtag was dissolved. The Crown Prince opposed both the elections and the policy of repression. He wrote to Bismarck to say so in early September and the two met for an audience, which Bismarck described in his memoirs:
I asked him why he held so aloof from the government; in a few years he would be its master; and if his principles were not ours, he should rather endeavour to effect a gradual transition than throw himself into opposition. That suggestion he decisively rejected, apparently suspecting me of a desire to pave the way for my transfer into his service. The refusal was accompanied by a hostile expression of Olympian disdain, which after all these years I have not forgotten; today I still see before me the averted head, the flushed face, and the glance cast over the left shoulder. I suppressed my own rising choler, thought of Carlos and Alva (Act 2, sc. 5), and answered that my words had been prompted by an access o
f dynastic sentiment, in the hope of restoring him to closer relations with his father … I hoped he would dismiss the idea that I aimed at some day becoming his minister; that I would never be. His wrath fell as suddenly as it had risen, and he concluded the conversation in a friendly tone.80
The crackdown on the civil service now extended to the armed forces, to which the King issued a directive that the ‘further participation of the army and fleet in elections contradicts the spirit and intentions of the constitution. I consider it therefore as inappropriate.’81 On 7 October Bismarck issued another order to civil servants to limit their participation. The text of the edict was issued in The Provincial Correspondence, an official government paper which had just been founded:
According to the legal provisions, all military and civil servants, in addition to the general obligations of subjects owed to the King, are bound to special loyalty and obedience, in addition to the special services involved in the office. How can it be compatible with this special loyalty and obedience if they take part in party political activity which is manifestly directed at belittling, limiting or overthrowing the government installed by the King and acting in his name? The simplest intelligence must see that such manifest betrayal of duty is completely incompatible with an ordered tenure of office.82
On 20 and 28 October the Landtag elections first and second rounds took place: Wagener and Blanckenburg were elected in Belgard, Pomerania, Kleist’s old district. The Provincial Correspondence rejoiced:
The little band of eleven Conservatives, who were in the previous house, has been strengthened by four times, and among the new Conservative deputies can be found several of the finest, battle-hardened leaders of those loyal to the King.83
Bismarck: A Life Page 28
