Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  On 14 August, August von der Heydt, the new Finance Minister, Bismarck’s ‘Gold Uncle’, presented the indemnity bill to the Budget Committee of the House and stated that the indemnity and the request for new lines of credit had to be considered together, ‘because the Government feels itself under no pressure whatever; on the contrary its financial position is entirely positive and hence the Government has no inclination to make concessions.’ The Committee voted by 25 to 8 in favour of the double bill, because ‘it seems illogical to grant the Government credit and refuse it the indemnity.’ The two houses passed the bill and the King signed it on 14 September 1866.13

  A sign of the changing times took place in another part of Berlin. On 5 September 1866 the new synagogue in the Moorish style on the Oranienburger Strasse was dedicated. With its 3,000 seats it was the largest and most ornate synagogue in Germany. As Emil Breslaur reported the event in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums,

  At 11.30 in the morning the magnificent building was dedicated. Flowers and wreaths, valuable potted plants in artistic arrangements decorated the entrance and the lobby. The sanctuary was filled partly with the Jewish community and partly with the invited guests of honour. Among the latter we noticed Count Bismarck, Minister v.d. Heydt, Field Marshall Wrangel, Police President von Bernuth, in addition to magistrates and members of the City Council, many members of the Prussian House of Deputies among whom were President Forckenbek (sic!), Dr Kosch, Johann Jacoby. A prelude composed for the occasion by Organist Schwantzer opened the ceremony. After that the choir under the direction of the Royal Director of Music Lewandowski, accompanied by organ and brass choir intoned the boruch habboh and the ma tauvu as the ornamented Torah scrolls entered the sanctuary.

  Bismarck and the other guests watched the scrolls proceed down the main aisle where to fanfare and the singing of the Schema they were placed in the Ark. Rabbi Aub then preached a sermon on Verse 9, Chapter 2 of the Prophet Haggai: ‘The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the LORD of hosts.’14 No doubt the Rabbi’s text applied at least as much to the ‘glory’ of the new North German Federation as to the great sanctuary of the Jewish community.

  The Konfliktzeit had ended and Bismarck wanted to rid himself of the ‘Conflict’ cabinet. Bodelschwingh had gone at the end of May 1866 but the King hated new faces As a result Bismarck only rid himself of Selchow and Itzenplitz in 1873, and Mühler in 1872. The Justice Minister, Count Lippe, he did manage to sack in 1867. As Helma Brunck puts it, ‘Bismarck saw himself as the real victor of Düppel and Königgrätz … and the collegial structure of the State Ministry was very soon a thorn in his side.’15 As always in Bismarck’s career the power lay in other hands. These cabinet ministers served the King not the Minister-President and because Bismarck rejected parliamentary government, he deprived himself of that power over a cabinet which the typical Prime Minister of any European country now takes for granted. He could not simply reshuffle his cabinet. Bismarck’s dictatorial urges collide with the reality of royal power. He also made the dismissed ministers his permanent enemies but he knew it, as he explained to Gustav von Diest: ‘I never underestimated how dangerous Bodelschwingh was. Do you know what he is? He’s the fox that you think you have shot, throw over your shoulder to take home and which then bites you in the arse.’16

  On 21 September 1866 the Prussian army staged its victory parade complete with a solemn Te Deum in front of the royal palace. Gustav Mevissen (1815–99), one of the leading Catholic industrialists and bankers of period,17 stood in the crowd as the troops marched by and recorded his feelings:

  I cannot shake off the impression of this hour. I am no devotee of Mars … but the trophies of war exercise a magic charm on the child of peace. One’s eyes are involuntarily riveted on, and one’s spirit goes along with, the unending rows of men who acclaim the god of the moment: success.18

  In February 1867 the Revue moderne published Ludwig Bamberger’s Monsieur de Bismarck. The essay was a great success and it was reprinted in book form in June 1867. Bamberger, a Jewish revolutionary turned successful banker, became one of Bismarck’s most intimate advisers. He was certainly among the first to see how radical Bismarck was:

  Now Germany has never made a revolution on its own. It has the glory of having founded Protestantism and developed philosophic liberty but with respect to political enfranchisement it has produced nothing original, spontaneous or durable. It cannot compare itself in that respect with England, nor the United States, nor France, nor Switzerland, nor Holland, nor Belgium. It is the last arrival among the nations and the year 1866 marks the first time it has witnessed a grand organic change without an impulse from abroad … One cannot doubt for a moment that Bismarck is a born revolutionary. Revolutionaries are born—as are legitimists—by some structure in the brain; whereas chance decides whether that same human being will turn into a red or a white one.19

  By the 1860s the German popular press had begun to develop and it too turned Bismarck into what we would call a media personality. The weekly Gartenlaube (the Garden Arbour) founded in 1853 as a new popular middle-class magazine, began in 1867 to publish a column called ‘Photographs from the Reichstag’. In its April number it brought a reverent portrait of Bismarck:

  On the raised bench reserved for the Federal Councillors sits the man whom not only Prussia and Germany but the whole of Europe follows with rapt attention and lively interest. Like the biblical King Saul he towers over his contemporaries by a full head in height, an imposing, aristocratic figure in an elegant cuirassier’s uniform, a person who combines the energy of the soldier with the elasticity and flexibility of the statesman.20

  Pictures and busts of Bismarck were sold by thousands. He had become a symbol.

  The King awarded him a ‘dotation’ from the royal fund on 7 June 1867. With it Bismarck purchased an estate in Pomerania, which contained the village of Varzin. After he had purchased it, in a typical example of Bismarckian parsimony, he offered to sell Kniephof to his brother or to his cousin Philipp, ‘but not cheaper than I would get for it on the open market.’21 The founder of states, the world-historical figure, Otto von Bismarck, retained to the end the tight-fisted pettiness of the impoverished country squire. On the other hand, as we have seen, he also retained the natural and unaffected hospitality that he had learned as a young man. He urged his friend Motley to visit him on his new estate. As he explained to Motley in 1869, though it was far from Berlin, the railroad had changed everything. ‘Leaving Berlin at 9 o’clock you are here for dinner.’22 When Motley finally visited Varzin, he described how the Bismarcks lived there in a letter to his wife Mary:

  The way of life is very simple at Varzin, but the irregularity of hours is great. I usually came down stairs, as well as Lily, [Motley’s daughter—JS] between nine and ten. Madame de B, Marie, and the sons came in promiscuously and had breakfast with us. Bismarck came down about eleven. His breakfast is very light—egg and a cup of coffee—and then he has a meerschaum pipe. While he is sitting there and talking to all of us, his secretary hands him the pile of letters with which he is goaded in his retirement, and with a lead pencil about a foot long he makes memoranda as to the answers and other dispositions to be made. Meanwhile the boys are playing billiards in another part of the same room and a big black dog, called ‘Sultan’ is rampaging generally through the apartment and joining in everybody’s conversation … On the courtyard side the house consists of a main building two stories high, with two long wings projecting from the house, in which are servants’ rooms and offices, making three sides of an open quadrangle. On the lawn or wood side there is a long veranda running in front of the main house. Inside is a square hall with a wide staircase leading to a large hall above, out of which are four spacious bedrooms. On each side of the hall below is a suite of one or two rooms, which are the family and reception rooms, besides his library and the private rooms of the ladies. The estate is about 30,000
morgens, equal to 20,000 acres. A great part—certainly two thirds—forest, pine, oak, beech. Of the rest a small farm, some 200 or 300 acres, is in his own hands. The rest is let in large farms of 800 or 900 acres. The river Wipper, which runs through the property, is a valuable water power. He has built two or three mills upon it, one of which is already let and in operation.23

  Varzin became an essential part of his psychic economy; he needed the woods, the quiet, the long walks and the sense of being on his own land. He returned to that identity as a Junker squire with which he had grown up. It was his retreat.

  For much of 1867 he could not get away from Berlin; there was simply too much to do. He had to construct two governments: to rearrange the Prussian State Ministry and to create the new Federal Government of the North German Federation. Bismarck intended to run both but could not at once see how. If the new Prussian-dominated Federation to a large extent recreated the old Bund but without Austria, it might simply carry over the institutions of Frankfurt. It would have a committee of ambassadors as its governing body and a secretary or chancellor of the new federation to execute its collective decisions. The Federal Chancellor might be a civil servant, who would take orders from the Prussian Minister-President, that is, from Bismarck. The votes of Prussia plus those of the swallowed-up German states would give Prussia a blocking veto in any case and the ministates would never dare oppose Prussia. A statesman who could abolish the venerable Kingdom of Hanover would have Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen for breakfast. On the other hand, as Bismarck’s new national Liberal friends desired, the new Federation could be a real state with its own national cabinet, its own laws, weights and measures and national politics. The uneasy and uncertain creation of the hybrid German federal structure would have been difficult in any case but Bismarck’s now insatiable ambition made it almost insoluble.

  Tidying up had to take place in addition in the formal relations with the South German states which had fought with Austria and now confronted in the North German Federation a victorious, enlarged, and much more threatening Prussia. On 13, 17, and 22 August Prussia concluded peace treaties and identical treaties of alliance with Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria. On 23 September 1866 Hanover was annexed and became a province of Prussia.

  Queen Augusta watched these treaties and transformations with mounting anxiety. She belonged, as a Princess of the Duchy of Weimar, to the ‘Ernestine’ branch of the royal family of Saxony. She liked to lapse into Saxon dialect and never entirely settled into Prussian ways. She felt sympathy for the middle states and was the mother of the Grand Duchess of Baden. She wrote marginal comments on the long reports from Freiherr von Roggenbach about the political transformation in the four still independent states in southern Germany and she drafted passages of letters to her husband, the King. On 11 October she wrote to King William attaching the Roggenbach memorandum:

  I beg you most earnestly, to do everything possible to seize the hand of friendship which Baden extends to you. I would be neglecting my maternal duty if I did not convey to you the seriousness of the situation described above and not urge you in God’s name that you act in good time to protect those dear to us to the advantage of that beautiful country.24

  The Queen and Roggenbach continued during the autumn of 1866 to exchange lengthy letters which for security they sent by trusted agents. They considered problems of sovereignty and the relationship between Prussia, the new Federation, and the existing states both inside and outside the new federation. The Queen’s energy, clarity, and tenacity made her a formidable opponent of Bismarck but an unnecessary one. Had Bismarck offered her the same attentions that Roggenbach did, he might have won her over. Nothing in the letters suggests that in 1866 she rejected the King’s or Bismarck’s policies as such. She worried, entirely reasonably, about the interactions in what had become a complex, layered, and evolving structure of imperfect sovereignties. In a letter of early January 1867 she wrote with regret that

  Since I have no personal contact with the leading personalities and the director of affairs in the cases when I meet him, is unresponsive, I can say, alas, nothing about his view, whether in the meantime it has been refined … Nor unfortunately can I send you a copy of the Federal Constitution, because I have not been able to obtain one myself.25

  Had Bismarck been a little less suspicious and misogynist, he would have found this remarkable lady, if not an ally, at least a willing listener, but then that would have involved listening seriously to a woman he could not control or ignore. His policy of grotesque small insults—the Queen had not been sent a copy of the new constitution—reveals that persistent petty vindictiveness with which he treated his enemies.

  Bismarck in the meantime had collapsed physically. The strain of the recent months had taken their toll. Thus began a pattern which became more and more common over the years. Bismarcks’s frequent illnesses led to longer and longer absences from Berlin. Pflanze calculates that between 14 May 1875 and November 1878, of 1,275 days, Bismarck spent 772 of them, that is 60 per cent, either at his estates or at spas.26 Bismarck’s illness worried senior diplomats. General von Schweinitz tried to find out how he was and recorded the following entry in his diary:

  Count von der Goltz has arrived, he was in Varzin. When I asked whether Bismarck was really ill, he answered with his very peculiar laugh, which people in Paris describe as ‘la joie fait peur’. ‘What? That man ill? Bismarck is never ill, I am ill.’ Goltz told me a lot but not enough.27

  In 1866 Bismarck withdrew to convalesce at Putbus on the Baltic. Legend has it that Bismarck and his faithful amanuensis, the former socialist Lothar Bucher, drafted the constitution in two days; in fact, as Pflanze shows, Bismarck had drafted much himself earlier and had received help but it was his constitution, designed by him to suit himself and to maintain the peculiar structures of absolutism on which his power rested.

  The constitution, like the later constitution of the German Empire, rested on a compact among the Princes who created it. The people played no role and the word only appears once in connection with the Reichstag which represents ‘the people’. The sections dealing with the Federal Council and the Federal Presidium are the most characteristic. Article 6 states that the Bundesrat or Federal Council consists of the former members of the old Bundesrat in Frankfurt, ‘the voting rights of whom are governed by the regulations for the Plenum of the former German Bund, so that Prussia with the votes formerly held by Hanover, Electoral Hessen, Nassau and Frankfurt, has 17 votes’. According to Article 7 decisions are made by ‘simple majority’. Since Prussia had 17 of 43 total votes, any small group of states joined to Prussia could block a measure. The head of the Federation (Article 11) is ‘the Presidium which belongs to the King of Prussia’. The Presidium (Article 12) can summon, adjourn, or dissolve the Federal Council and Reichstag and Article 15 states that the chair of the Federal Council and direction of affairs belongs to the Bundeskanzler or Federal Chancellor, whom the Presidium names. The office which Bismarck designed for himself depends directly on the King of Prussia as Presidium and on no one else. No cabinet or other officers exist formally. The other important article was Article 20 which states that the Reichstag is elected in general and direct elections with secret ballot.28 Bismarck had given his word in 1866 and kept it.

  The North German Federation had a democratic lower house, comparable with the most democratic in the world at that time. Yet the rights of the democracy had limits. Army strength rested on 1 per cent of the size of the population (Article 60) and the sum of 225 thaler per soldier was settled by Article 62. Thus the Reichstag had no say in fixing expenditure for the army. Bismarck had eliminated from the start any new conflict. The whole draft had the defects that one would expect in a text by Bismarck: no bill of rights, no separate judiciary, no power to collect direct taxes, no immunities and rights for deputies outside the chambers. The edifice—complicated and unwieldy—rested on one fulcrum—the common sovereignty of the King of Prussia and the Presidium of the Bund and the
one common officer: the Minister-President of Prussia and the Bundeskanzler or Federal Chancellor. In other words Bismarck designed it for Bismarck. The Constitution of the North German Federation became more or less verbatim the Imperial Constitution of 1871 for the new German Empire. It thus transmitted to the united Germany after 1871 all the defects of Prussian kingship. Article 63 gives command of all the armed forces to the King of Prussia and his command remains unlimited. Hence court entourages, military and naval cabinets, and camarillas continue to exist under the new arrangements as before. If the Presidium wishes to dismiss the Chancellor, he can. Bismarck built this fragile structure not only to suit himself but also to suit an arrangement in which a strong Chancellor bullies a weak king. As he discovered in 1890 that guarantee could not protect him against a different sort of sovereign.

  He made the final corrections after he returned to Berlin on 1 December and presented it on 9 December to the King, Crown Prince, and the Prussian ministers and to a council of ministers representing the states on 15 December 1866. The negotiations with the princes proved to be uncomfortable but Bismarck, as always, had his alternative ready. The new Reichstag would be elected on 12 February 1867. If the King of Saxony or the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin made trouble, Bismarck would have to turn to the democratic forces likely to be elected. He secretly gave orders to the Prussian bureaucracy not to help conservatives as usual but to help radicals here and there in order to exert ‘sufficient pressure against recalcitrant governments’.29