By a fortunate coincidence, the Prussian voters went to the polls on the very day of the battle of Königgrätz-Sadowa and, as the official Provincial Correspondence reported with glee: ‘The domination of the Progressive Party has been broken. The Party has surrendered a large number of seats in the House of Deputies to more moderate, partly to conservative and partly liberal, deputies but of decisively patriotic temper.’ The Progressive fraction fell from 143 members to 83, Conservatives grew from 38 to 123, and centrist Liberals fell from 110 to 65.261 As Rudolf Bamberger observed to his brother Ludwig, ‘It’s interesting to observe what effect success has. Ten days ago with the exception of a few thinking people, there were no friends of Prussia; today it’s different.’262 Bismarck had won on both fronts—foreign and domestic—and in exactly the way he outlined to Disraeli. A victory abroad had destroyed the opposition at home. In a matter of twenty-four hours Bismarck had become ‘Bismarck’, the genius-statesman.
His next step shows that he deserved the title ‘genius-statesman’. He made peace with Austria without annexations and without a victory parade in Vienna. It was his greatest moment in human and diplomatic terms. As he wrote to his wife, six days after the victory:
If we do not exaggerate our claims and do not believe that we have conquered the world, we can arrive at a peace worth the effort. But we are as quickly intoxicated as we become down-hearted and I have the thankless task of pouring cold water into the bubbling cauldron and reminding people that we do not live alone in Europe but with three neighbours.263
When Stosch went to see him as representative of the Crown Prince, Bismarck told him exactly the same things, as he reported to Karl von Normann (1827–88) the influential private secretary to the Crown Prince:
First of all he explained that it was a question of Austria’s exclusion from Germany, further damage or surrender of territory and the like should not take place, because later we shall want Austria’s force for ourselves … he could assure me how wonderful he found it that brilliant military victories make the best basis for diplomatic arts. Everything went as if oiled.264
Moltke agreed absolutely, as wrote to his wife, that he was ‘very much in favour that we do not place the achievements we have made at risk again, if we can avoid that. That I hope can be done, if we do not seek revenge but fix our eyes on our own advantage.’265 General Leonhard Count von Blumenthal, chief of staff of the Second Army, thought exactly the same thing:
The peace negotiations are going well and the peace would have been signed if the King had not made difficulties. He insists that Austria surrender territory to us, which they are only prepared to do as part of reparations for war damage. It looks as if this point of honour is the stumbling block.266
In 1877 Bismarck gave an account of the events leading to the peace settlement with Austria that gives a very different picture of the attitude of the generals. He told it to Lucius von Ballhausen, who recorded it in his diary and he repeated this account in his memoirs in the 1890s:
I was the only person among the 300 or so who had to rely entirely on his own judgement without being able to ask anybody. In the war council, all with the king at the head, wanted to continue the war. I stated, fighting a war in Hungary in the heat, with the drought and the spreading cholera was extremely dangerous, and what was the objective? After all the generals had voted against me, I declared, ‘as a general I have been outvoted, but as minister I must submit my resignation if my judgement were not accepted.’ The deliberations took place in my room, because I was ill. After my declaration I left, shut and locked the door and went to my sleeping quarters and threw myself, sobbing and broken, onto the bed. The others deliberated in whispers for a while and then slipped away.
The following day I had a stormy encounter with the King … he called my peace conditions ‘shameful’. He demanded Bohemia, Austrian Silesia, Ansbach-Bayreuth, East Friesland, a slice of Saxony etc. I tried to make clear to him that one could hardly fatally wound those with whom later one would want and indeed have to live. He rejected that idea and threw himself weeping onto the sofa. ‘My first minister will be a deserter in the face of the enemy and imposes this shameful peace on me.’
I left him, firm in my decision, and had just slammed the door to my room and laid down my sabre when the Crown Prince walked in and volunteered to go to his father. He wanted peace and could understand and approve my motives. I had made the war and must now bring it to a conclusion. After a few hours he brought me a letter from his father which I have kept. The expression ‘shameful’ appears twice in it. ‘Since I leave him in the lurch, and regardless of the brilliant success of the army, so he agrees to submit to the shameful conditions.’ These shameful conditions became the Peace of Prague.267
Engelberg writes that Bismarck’s memoirs are deeply misleading.
Why Bismarck misled generations of readers of ‘Reminiscences and Reflections’ with a legend about a fronde by the generals against his peace efforts can be explained politically by the period in which they were written. He knew that among the forces which had brought about his fall were leading military men. Thus his false portrayal of the relationship to the generals was an act of political revenge against the Prussian-German General Staff of the 1890s.268
That cannot explain the fact that, when Bismarck told Lucius the story in 1877, he had not fallen from power and Lucius had no reason to doubt it. His relationship with the military in 1866 changed during the Franco-Prussian War when he waged an exhausting and bitter struggle against the General Staff officers, whom he called ‘the demi-gods’, about strategy and politics and it may be that he conflated the two experiences. We have other sources that confirm the King’s emotional reaction to the victory and the hysterical behaviour of both King and his chief Minister had by 1866 become part of their relationship. Still it typifies Bismarck’s constant tendency, even the stories he repeated at dinner, to rewrite the past. I suppose that more of us do that than we know. Our tales of life never receive the pedantically thorough examination that Bismarck’s have had.
On 26 July 1866, Prussia and Austria signed a preliminary peace agreement at Nikolsburg which established the following agreement:
1. Austria is to withdraw entirely from the association of German states;
2. Austria recognizes the formation of a federation of the North German states under Prussian leadership;
3. The relationship between the south German states among themselves and with the North German Federation remains to be decided by freely agreed arrangements.
4. Austria recognizes the alterations of possessions to be carried out in North Germany.
5. Austria to pay a reparation of 40 million thaler for war damage.269
The ‘alteration of possessions’, according to Pflanze, constituted ‘Bismarck’s most revolutionary act in 1866’.270 With a stroke of the pen, the historic Kingdom of Hanover lost its independence and King George, a cousin of Queen Victoria, lost his throne. The Duchy of Nassau and the part of Hesse-Kassel north of the Main and the city of Frankfurt were simply swallowed up. If Bismarck’s moderation at Nikolsburg shows his best side, his treatment of the Free City of Frankfurt shows his worst. It reveals in miniature the brutal behaviour of the Prussian army in the intoxication of victory. On 16 July 1866 General Vogel von Falckenstein occupied Frankfurt am Main and took command of the city. Three days later the Prussian army seized and transported to Berlin 155 pounds of silver. Manteuffel, who had replaced Vogel von Falckenstein as city commandant then demanded 25 million gulden within 24 hours which was reduced to 19 million when the authorities explained that they had already contributed. The order came directly from Bismarck. Bürgermaster Fellner asked for more time to consult the legislative assembly and, when asked, the assembly refused to pay.271 The Prussians demanded a list of those who voted against the contribution to punish them; Fellner refused to give them the names. On 23 July Bürgermaster Fellner commited suicide. General Maximilian Count von Roedern (1816–98), who had no
w replaced Manteuffel as military governor, ordered that Fellner be buried at 5 a.m. but two senators who escaped from the occupied city got the story of Prussian ‘atrocities’ into the papers. Appelationsgerichtsrat Dr Kügler, Senator Fellner’s brother-in-law, presented the rope to General von Röder. ‘The general told him in the gruffest voice, “that the contribution had to be paid regardless” and continued smoking his cigar.’272 Irritated by the opposition of the city in which he had spent nine pleasant years, on 25 July 1866, the day before the signature of the preliminary peace at Nikolsburg, Bismarck added Frankfurt to the list of states to be annexed, though it had not been on the ‘maximum demands list’ before.273 The citizens of Frankfurt learned what many more were to learn—that Bismarck tolerated no opposition. This little piece of gratuitous brutality reminds us that the victorious Prussian army under the grandsons and great grandsons of the von Röders and von Manteuffels became notorious for atrocities on much grander scale between 1939 and 1945.
The scale of Bismarck’s triumph cannot be exaggerated. He alone had brought about a compete transformation of the European international order. He had told those who would listen what he intended to do, how he intended to do it, and he did it. He achieved this incredible feat without commanding an army, and without the ability to give an order to the humblest common soldier, without control of a large party, without public support, indeed, in the face of almost universal hostility, without a majority in parliament, without control of his cabinet and without a loyal following in the bureaucracy. He no longer had the support of the powerful conservative interest groups who had helped him to achieve power. The most senior diplomats in the foreign service like Robert von der Goltz and Albrecht Bernstorff were sworn enemies and he knew it. The Queen and the Royal Family hated him and the King, emotional and unreliable, would soon have his 70th birthday. Beyond Roon and Moritz von Blankenburg, I cannot think of any reliable friends to whom he could tell the truth about his policies. Indeed without Roon’s quiet advocacy and complete loyalty he would not have survived politically and physically. With perfect justice, in August 1866, he pounded his fist on his desk and cried, ‘I have beaten them all! All!’274
8
The Unification of Germany, 1866–1870
Bismarck’s great triumph left him in a new situation. He had become a national hero. The Austrian reparation of 40 million thaler had transformed the government’s financial situation and he had a completely new structure to construct for Germany. The old Bund had been swept away and Austria expelled from all German affairs to find its new identity as an ‘eastern’ power. Even before the preliminary peace at Nikolsburg had been signed, the official press announced that elections would be held and that a draft electoral law would be presented to the Prussian parliament. In addition to Prussia and those territories newly included under Prussia (Hanover, Nassau, part of Hesse-Kassel and Frankfurt), invitations to participate would go out to Sachsen-Altenburg, Sachsen-Coburg, Sachsen-Weimar, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Reuß younger Line (Gera), Reuss elder Line, Waldeck, Lippe-Detmold, Schaumburg-Lippe, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Anhalt, Oldenburg, Braunschweig, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. The Prussian Law of 12 April 1849 would be the basis of the new electoral system according to which every electoral district should have 100,000 voters. The census of the enlarged Prussian state showed that Prussia would now have 19,255,139 inhabitants. Prussia and Posen would, therefore, have 193 deputies.1 The new federation would as a result be unevenly constructed with Prussia constituting more than four-fifths of the population and land area.
Another outstanding matter had to be settled—the nearly four years in which the Bismarck government had ruled without parliamentary approval of its budget. Bismarck had already convinced the King to make a conciliatory gesture to the liberal opposition over the budget deadlock. Again even before the text of the Nikolsburg agreement had been agreed, Bismarck moved to get the Landtag into session. This time he used his wife to act as agent. He wrote to her on 18 July to tell her that the negotiations in Nikolsburg had begun and asked her, ‘why were our chambers not summoned? Ask Eulenburg about it and say to him that it is vital that the parliamentary corps be allowed to intervene before the peace negotiations have been seriously discussed.’2 Bismarck intended to use the liberal and nationalist forces as a political factor to strengthen his hand in negotiating in the name of the nation but he also let his cabinet colleagues know that the Landtag would be called into session as soon as His Majesty had returned to Berlin to discuss the settlement of the outstanding dispute over the budget. The King had agreed—to the horror of the ‘conflict ministers’—to request indemnity for the unconstitutional past.
Even before the King’s return to Berlin, the fronts in Prussian politics had begun to shift. On 28 July a new conservative party emerged, dedicated to support Bismarck, which called itself the Free Conservative Union. On the same day Treitschke wrote to his wife, ‘the revolution in which we stand comes from above.’3 Many liberals now admitted the error of their ways. Rudolf Ihering (1818–92), a Göttingen Professor of Law and an expert in property rights,4 who had called the war an act of ‘frightful frivolity’, now submitted to the ‘genius of Bismarck’.5 Liberals and nationalists could reconcile their new positions with their former opposition because, as Christopher Clark argues, Bismarck had defeated neo-absolutist and Catholic Austria and hence won a great victory against the forces of reactionary Catholicism. Bismarck’s politics and the victory of a Protestant Kingdom, in the eyes of many Liberal Prussian Protestants, must be providential and progressive.6 For these were the 1860s in which under Pius IX any hint of liberalism had been condemned. Bismarck’s wars had put him on the side of the Roman Catholic Church’s enemies through his alliance with the ‘godless’ Kingdom of Italy that had usurped papal territories during its unification struggle and under Prime Minister Count Cavour had dedicated the new Kingdom of Italy to the proposition of ‘una libera chiesa nello stato liberale’—a free church in the free state. It was logical too that the Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli on hearing the news of the Austrian defeat at Königgrätz-Sadowa cried out in anguish ‘Casca il mondo! (the world is falling).7
Not everybody welcomed Bismarck’s new policy of reconciliation. The text of the Speech from the Throne had been leaked and on 1 August 1866, Hans von Kleist wrote a lengthy memorandum to Bismarck against the indemnity proposal:
How is it remotely conceivable, all old Prussian institutions, all elements of its power, are to be surrendered through this one declaration in the Speech from the Throne and that through it—its finances, its army, its House of Lords, the Monarchy, Prussia itself—is to be given over to the temporary majority of a second chamber which will emerge from its new provisions? It would in the short or long run hopelessly go under in an unfathomable whirlpool. Prussia without the spirit which made it is as good as dead … without an independent Monarchy.8
Bismarck, who got word of the leak in Prague where he had gone for the final peace negotiations with the Austrians, dismissed his old friend with contempt. He wrote to his wife on 3 August that there was a
huge feud over the Speech from the Throne. Lippe spreads the great word in conservative sense against me and Hans Kleist has written me an excited letter. These little fellows have not got enough to do, cannot see as far as the ends of their noses and practise their swimming on the stormy waves of phrases. I can deal with my enemies but the friends! They all wear blinkers and only see a patch of the world.9
While the Kreuzzeitung conservatives drew back with horror from Bismarck, who had been their friend, his former enemies among German liberals drew near to him. As Karl Frenzel wrote in the journal Deutsches Museum:
Through its past the government has made an enemy of liberalism, through the war which it fought, the annexations which it prepares, an enemy of feudalism. The success which it achieved in domestic affairs rests in the weakening of both parties and in the creation of
a government party which will grow stronger and stronger.10
The White Hall of the Palace was crowded with deputies on 5 August 1866 as the King delivered the Speech from the Throne. In it the King admitted that the
government had run the state budget for many years without a legal basis … I cherish the confidence that the recent events will contribute to the necessary understanding to the extent that an indemnity will be willingly granted to my Government in respect to the administration carried on without a budget law and thus the previous conflict will be brought to an end for all time.11
During the Speech from the Throne,
Hans von Kleist avoided greeting Bismarck but stood at a place in the White Chamber so Bismarck could not fail to see him. Both waited until the ceremony was over and the White Chamber had emptied. Bismarck approached von Kleist and asked ‘Say, old boy, where did you get the Speech from the Throne?’ ‘I will not tell you.’ ‘In this matter I don’t like jokes. I shall have to get the state prosecutor on to you if you don’t.’ ‘Yes, you can lock me up but you still won’t find out.’ They parted without a word. As Kleist was changing at home, the Minister President sent a message by his factotum Engel and asked Kleist to come to him. There he found Robert von der Goltz and Karl Friedrich von Savigny. The Minister-President had got his balance back, went to the new arrival in a friendly way and shook his hand. ‘It’s all forgotten.’ An indiscrete minister has confessed at the State Council. ‘I suppose, it must have been Wagener.’ Then he explained to Goltz and Savigny that he had made peace with the Crown Prince over the word ‘indemnity’.12
In spite of the apology, the friendship between Bismarck and Kleist never recovered.
Bismarck had now moved into the odd position that he needed Liberals in order to complete his plans for the new German state. The Liberals became his allies from 1866 until he dumped them unceremoniously in the late 1870s. An even odder feature of the new political arena emerges from the paradox that the Bismarck after 1866 rapidly achieved personally a ‘cult’ status but his Free Conservative Party never had a real following. Three main parties dominated Bismarck’s new Germany: Liberals (divided into pro- and anti-Bismarck wings), Conservatives (increasingly anti-Bismarck), and Catholics (anti-Bismarck). At no stage could he rely on any of these three as his party. Thus the new period opens with the paradox that the most powerful figure of the nineteenth century had no real parliamentary support and still depended on the person, the emotions, and the attitudes of a very old monarch. Waves of nationalism swept Germany but Bismarck was no nationalist. Liberals saw unity and liberty but Bismarck was no liberal, and, as Hans von Kleist and Ludwig Gerlach now knew, he was no conservative either. Bismarck changed colour like certain deep pools of water which refract the light in various hues.
Bismarck: A Life Page 35
