Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  As the joke has it, ‘just because you are paranoid does not mean that you are not being followed’. Bismarck suspected—and he was correct in this—that a conspiracy against him had began to take more formal shape in the mid-1860s. Queen Augusta now received regular foreign and domestic policy reports from Franz Freiherr von Roggenbach (1825–1907), former Prime Minister of Baden. Roggenbach, handsome and distinguished, had enjoyed a brilliant career, becoming Prime Minster of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1861 at the age of 36. He loathed Bismarck even before he had become a serious threat. In May of 1865 Roggenbach suddenly announced his resignation in protest at Bismarck’s policy in Schleswig-Holstein. Major Albrecht von Stosch, who became in time a member of the Queen’s private ‘shadow administration’, wrote to his friend Otto von Holtzendorff to express his regret at the resignation:

  Your news from Baden interested me very much. Roggenbach was like a shooting star among statesmen. It makes me very sad that he gave up his bold project before he had completed it.201

  From the summer of 1865 on Roggenbach began to supply Queen Augusta with lengthy memoranda prepared with the expertise and authority of an experienced German diplomat and minister. The published collected correspondence of Roggenbach with the Queen and von Stosch which began after his resignation amounts to 453 pages.202 In Bismarck’s memoirs Roggenbach appears always as a source of intrigues and they were that. Other moderate Liberal constitutionalists had close ties to the courts of the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the Grand Duke of Baden, and to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg.203 General von Stosch belonged to the circle, the rare liberal Prussian general. Bismarck had good ground to be suspicious.

  The Prussian King and his ministers had opted for war with Austria and a Crown Council meeting took place on Monday 27 March 1866 at which the King agreed to order a partial mobilization and a call-up of reserves. Roon worried that ‘Bismarck’s neurotic impatience’ would cause a disaster.204 The next day, like clockwork, Bismarck wrote impatiently to Roon that ‘it is very much to be wished that tomorrow the King issues definitive orders. Maundy Thursday he will not be in the mood for such things. You see him tomorrow. Couldn’t you arrange that we see him together?’ Roon did arrange that and on 29 March, the Wednesday before Easter 1866, the orders were actually signed.205 Moltke calmly went into action. He knew his mobilization plans had been greatly improved in the last two years and reassured Roon on 5 April:

  That the Austrians—if one gives them enough time—will have as many troops in the field as we can summon is nothing new. I have made that clear at all our conferences. It is not a question of the absolute numbers of troop strength but essentially of the time in which both sides can bring them to efficient deployment. Especially for this reason the tables at the end of my report showed clearly and visibly the evident advantage in which we will find ourselves for three whole weeks, if we take the initiative or at least mobilize at the same time as the Austrians.206

  On 14 April Moltke reported to the king on the next step. His strategy rested on the intelligent use of railroad lines. ‘Prussia’s three armies were now positioned—on paper—exactly astride the three main and six secondary railway lines. The Elbe army moved on the Berlin-Dresden-Friedland railroad, the First Army on the Frankfurt-Goerlitz-Liegnitz line and the Second Army on the Stettin-Breslau-Lamgaschutz-Rechenbach-Frankenstein and Brieg-Neisse railroads … In short 75 days before it was fought, Moltke envisioned the whole war scenario virtually as it later came out.’207

  The Crown Prince was horrified and wrote to General von Schweinitz:

  The King wants no war but for months now Bismarck has twisted things so that the old Gentleman has become more and more irritable and finally Bismarck will have ridden him so far that he will not be able to do anything but commit us to war, which will stir up Europe. Bismarck’s talent to manipulate things for the King is great and worthy of admiration. As an expression of his bottomless frivolity and piratical policies some sort of Reich reform idea will be dumped on the carpet, probably with proposals for a Reich parliament and that in the light of our domestic parliamentary conflict! That is a rich irony and bears its failure on its forehead. With such a man everything is possible.208

  The Austrians would certainly have agreed with that. They were getting nervous about the German question, as on 7 April Count Blome, Bismarck’s counterpart at Bad Gastein, now Austrian ambassador to Bavaria, wrote to State Secretary Hofrat Ludwig von Biegeleben in Vienna:

  Whoever feels the pulse of public opinion will agree with me that the phrase ‘reform of the Bund’ has caught fire and pushed the interest for Augustenburg and the independence of Holstein into the background. The fearful and anxious cling to Bund reform; the Bavarian conservatives cling to it since it will make Bavaria a great power. Bund reform attracts the entire ‘democracy’, which means by it a parliament.209

  The Crown Prince had guessed right about Bismarck’s intentions, and Blome had assessed the aims of the ‘democracy’ correctly. Neither saw that the two were connected. On 8 April the Prussian–Italian Treaty was signed, which Eyck called a ‘breach of the constitution of Germany’.210 According to its terms the kingdom of Italy was obliged to go to war against the Austrian Empire if war broke out within ninety days, and Bismarck clearly intended that to happen. The next day brought an even bigger shock. On 9 April 1866 the Prussian ambassador submitted a motion to the Bund which changed the entire history of Germany. Of all Bismarck’s many dazzling moves in a long career this one must be one of the most important. The official announcement, published on 11 April 1866, read as follows:

  The Prussian government has just taken a step of the greatest importance in the Federal Diet. It has introduced a motion that the Federal Assembly be minded to decide to call an assembly which will be chosen by direct and universal right to vote and at a date to be determined in due course to assemble in order to receive and consider the proposals of the German governments for a reform of the Federal Constitution and in the meantime until the meeting of the said assembly to establish such suggestions by agreement of the governments among themselves.211

  The Crown Prince had guessed correctly. Bismarck had indeed ‘dumped proposals for a Reich parliament on the carpet’ but even the Crown Prince had not foreseen the democratically elected parliament. Bismarck had called forth the power of democracy to outflank the Austrians and the German Federal States in the knowledge that the Habsburgs with their eleven national groups and the rising threat of nationalism could never compete on that ground. In 1866 Bismarck brandished democracy at the Habsburgs like a cross in front of a vampire, a not inappropriate image, since Dracula was a Romanian prince, and his castle was in Hungarian-ruled Romania, a territory without universal suffrage.

  German opinion was stunned by Bismarck’s move. The Liberal Kölnische Zeitung commented: ‘If Mephistopheles climbed up in the pulpit and read the Gospel, could anyone be inspired by this prayer?’212 The Austrian Ambassador to Saxony reported on the Saxon Prime Minister Beust’s view:

  According to his investigations here up to now the reaction in Dresden is that the Prussian motion for a German parliament has caused laughter because they see it as ludicrous to accept such a move from the hand of a Count Bismarck. Whether given the fatuous Germanism of a portion of the Saxon population, this cheerful reaction may not turn to something more reasonable, nobody can offer any guarantee.213

  The shock was greatest among Bismarck’s former patrons and supporters, the faithful Christian conservatives and readers of the Kreuzzeitung, his neighbours, friends, and relations. Count Adolf von Kleist was simply incredulous. In a letter to Ludwig von Gerlach he expressed his horror:

  What do you think of the latest twist by Bismarck? Summon up popular sovereignty, forming a constitutional convention!! And more than that the complete embarrassment. Austria is in the right, comes with the old suggestions of 1863 and garners universal applause. For God’s sake come to Berlin. You are the only one who still has some influence over him
or at least to whom he listens. Our allies are now the revolution in all its nuances. We are absolutely stunned. I am in despair.214

  A few days later, on 14 April 1866, Prince Albert of Prussia (1809–72), the youngest brother of Frederick William IV, also wrote to Gerlach but more hesitantly.

  What Bismarck’s object is with the project, I cannot grasp. In the first place he rejects the entire previous system. A grand slogan of the type of the Congress of Princes does not seem to be the purpose, is it in order to provoke Austria even more? … Not understanding, however, does not make me doubt Bismarck and I wait. But what do you think?215

  ‘Little Hans’ still stuck by his old friend and wrote to Gerlach on 16 April, from his estate, Kieckow:

  I thank you that you defended Bismarck against Adolf’s hasty condemnation. There can be no talk of a constituent assembly. There still remains: universal suffrage, but what else? … In order to judge him, one has to know the entire situation and instead of all us complaining and criticizing, just take it on trust. … May God permit poor Bismarck to get better, illuminate him and preserve us in peace and, if it cannot be preserved, may God purify his conscience by his attempt to have achieved everything through an honourable peace.216

  The members of the Kreuzzeitung party could not accept the resigned piety that Hans von Kleist urged on Gerlach: trust in God and trust in Otto. Many had had enough. On 2 May Privy Councillor J. Bindewald, one of Ludwig Gerlach’s former pupils and now a senior civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational, and Medical Affairs (the Kultusministerium), wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach who, as the acknowledged intellectual leader of the extreme Right, had yet to take a public position:

  I cannot keep still any longer and after consultation with President von Kleist and Beuttner, I beg you to intervene in the Kreuzzeitung so that from our point of view the objections and dangers in the federal reform project are noted and at least the principles are preserved which are more important than a diplomatic move with the purpose of embarrassing the opponent. The proposed parliament and its system of election upsets me less than the modus, the how and the place from which the thing has been staged. Without a parliamentary apparatus these days no statesman can operate and the parliament need not and should not be a constituting body. To treat the chambers at home with a riding crop and because of the complications with them to be standing on the verge of a coup d’état and then to hurl the parliament idea into Germany!217

  Two days later, 4 May, Prince Albert wrote to Ludwig von Gerlach again to tell him that as a general officer he had been informed of the partial mobilization. As to politics, he wrote,

  I have not been able to see or speak to Count Bismarck. He is still unwell and has only been out once or twice … The leading articles about federal reform have not entirely reconciled my feelings with it. There is much very doubtful about it but I have such boundless confidence in Bismarck that I suspect that it forms part of his long-term, well-thought out plan and is neither a momentary inspiration nor a political chess move.218

  It is interesting that a royal prince of the older generation should have assessed Bismarck so accurately. Attentive readers may recall the strong language that Bismarck used to the late General Leopold von Gerlach in the famous exchange of letters of 1857 about Napoleon III. Bismarck had seen that democracy and conservatism could be compatible and he intended to use universal suffrage as he used everything and everybody to achieve his end. That was all too much for Ludwig von Gerlach, who on 5 May published an article entitled ‘War and Federal Reform’ in the Kreuzzeitung:

  Let us take care not to fall into the dreadful false belief that God’s commandments stop at the field of politics. Justitia fundamentum regnorum … The justified calling on Prussia to expand its power in Germany matches the equally justified Austrian claim to maintain its power in Germany. Germany is no longer Germany if Prussia is not there or when Austria is not there … In the midst of the clanging of weapons Prussia introduces at the Bund a demand for universal suffrage. Universal suffrage means political bankruptcy—in place of living relations of law and political thought, instead of concrete personalities, we get numbers and exercises in addition.219

  Bismarck never forgave Ludwig von Gerlach for daring to criticize him in public. But it bothered him. In later years he would come back to Gerlach in conversation and mock him. Gerlach, a man of principle, continued to criticize Bismarck, the unforgivable sin of sins, so he had to be dismissed as a crank. In 1873 he explained to Lucius von Ballhausen that

  Gerlach has become entirely negative and criticizes everything. Frederick II was not ‘great’ and his regime was a series of failures and mistakes. He admires 1806 because nobody else does.220

  An Austrian diplomat commented bitterly on Bismarck’s tactics:

  We appeal to the noble sentiments: patriotism, honour, principles of law, energy, courage, decision, sense of independence, etc. He reckons on the lower motivations of human nature: avarice, cowardice, confusion, indolence, indecision and narrow-mindedness.221

  That list of lower motivations described perfectly the behaviour of the German states. They hesitated. They plotted. They combined and dissolved. In the end on 9 May the Federal Assembly voted by 9 to 5 on a Saxon motion to demand that Prussia explain the grounds for mobilization.

  The High Assembly of the Bund agrees without delay to approach the Royal Prussian Government to request that through an appropriate declaration with due recognition of Art. XI of the Federal Act (according to which members of the Bund may not wage war upon each other but should bring conflicts to the Federal Assembly for resolution) full reassurance will be received.222

  The Austrians had been outflanked on the Italian front by Bismarck’s alliance with Italy and in Germany by his alliance with the people. To the west Napoleon III could not make up his mind nor assure unity among his advisers about what to do: to join Prussia and Italy? To extract German territory on the Rhine from the Prussians as compensation for neutrality? To back Austria to maintain the balance of power? Bismarck played him like a big fish on a line, hauling him in, letting him out. Yes, he would surrender territory, but the King? That was the difficulty, and so on. In the end, on 24 May 1866, Napoleon III—caught between greed and fear—called a conference in the name of France, Britain, and Russia to meet in Paris to mediate between the two German Powers. On 26 May 1866 Albrecht von Stosch, as 2nd Quartermaster General of the II Army under the Crown Prince, attended the Grand War Council with the King, Moltke, Roon, Bismarck, and all the senior commanders and their chiefs of staff. In a letter to his wife he described how the King, tearful and upset, remained committed to maintenance of the peace:

  Bismarck gave hints that the war must decisively achieve the rounding off of Prussian territory. That caused the Crown Prince to ask the question whether there was an intention to annex territory. He had not heard that. The King answered angrily, that there is no question of war yet and still less of deposing German princes. He wants peace … Bismarck was by far the clearest and sharpest. I became convinced that he had brought about the whole situation in order to encourage the King to be more warlike … The meeting went on for three hours, and as we came out, the Crown Prince said, ‘we know no more than we did before. The King will not; Bismarck will.’223

  On 30 May Bismarck wrote to Robert von der Goltz, his ambassador in Paris:

  I regard the whole uproar and opposition in the country as entirely on the surface, stirred up by the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie and nourished in the popular masses by unrealistic promises. In the decisive moment the masses stand by the Monarchy, without distinction whether it has a liberal or conservative direction at that moment.224

  The Prussian government had accepted the invitation to Napoleon’s conference in Paris, because Bismarck dared not annoy the Emperor. Stosch told his wife that Bismarck would soon set off ‘to the conference in Paris. People see that as decisive because by his absence he loses his power over the King and his opponents, w
hose number grows each day, gain ground.’225 At this point Mensdorff made the first of two serious mistakes. Unlike the flexible Bismarck, Mensdorff refused to attend the conference in Paris because the status of Venetia might be discussed and Austrian territories in Italy were non-negotiable. The conference option fell through.

  On 2 June 1866, King William I made one of his most important decisions. He decreed that the General Staff Chief Helmuth von Moltke be officially put in command of the Prussian army with the right to issue orders in the name of the King. This broke the tradition of Frederick the Great that the King had to command his army in the field and gave to Moltke control of the entire operational leadership in war and its preparation in peace.226 The years of preparation and attention to small things would pay off. The General Staff had moved over to the 24-hour clock for its operations and every commander had orders to keep a war diary from day 1 of mobilization.227 By 5 and 6 June the Prussian deployment—approximately 330,000 men—on the borders had been completed.228 But there was still no war nor the crucial pretext for one.

  At this point, obligingly, Count Mensdorff made his second serious mistake. The Austrians asked the Federal Assembly to intervene in the conflict and placed the decision in its hands. It also ordered its Governor General in Holstein to call the estates of the Duchy into session. By so doing, it had unilaterally revoked the Bad Gastein Convention and gave Bismarck the chance to declare through the official press that