Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Apparently Frau von Mühler, who had been eavesdropping, dropped to her knees to pray when she heard Bismarck’s intentions.18 Von Mühler held out until January 1872 when he finally submitted his resignation. He explained his decision in a letter to Maximilian Count von Schwerin (1804–72), one of his predecessors in the Kultusministerium, who had accused Bismarck on 27 January 1863, in the Prussian Landtag that his motto was ‘Macht geht vor Recht’ (power trumps justice/law—JS]).19 Schwerin might be expected to understand von Mühler’s reaction.

  Bismarck’s approach in the Kulturkampf is to be explained by the entirely realistic—dare I say?—materialistic understanding which lies at the root of his entire political life. Bismarck despises all spiritual and moral levers in politics. Blood and iron—materialistic means of power—these are the factors with which he reckons. He would prefer to ban the church and religious ideas from public life and turn them into private matters. Separation of church and state, removal of the church from the school system and the school from religious instruction, these are very familiar views of his, as are the many steps he has taken and many public and private utterances in this direction, for which I have proof, make clear. He shows clearly a characteristic feature that, if not decisively anti-Christian, is at least anti-clerical and separationist and which borders on a middle ground between delusion and enmity. And on top of that comes his overly large ambition which tolerates no opposition and no longer even respects the personal convictions of the Kaiser.20

  The pious, very Christian von Mühler was replaced with a formidable liberal lawyer Adalbert Falk, whose name came to symbolize the Kulturkampf. Falk came from a Protestant pastor’s family in Silesia. A child prodigy, he entered Breslau University at 16 to become a lawyer, served in various of the elected bodies in the 1860s, and made a steady but not spectacular career in the Ministry of Justice, when to his surprise on 22 January 1872 he received a summons to the Chancellor who offered him the job as Kultusminister. When Falk asked Bismarck what he expected of him, Bismarck replied in one of his lapidary phrases ‘to restore the rights of the State against the Church and to do it with as little noise as possible’.21 Falk served Bismarck during the entire Kulturkampf, drafted most of the legislation and defended it in the Landtag. Falk believed in the state as an abstract entity, what Bornkamm called ‘practical Hegelianism’;22 Bismarck wanted to smash the Catholic Centre Party. The two went at the issues in completely different ways and the mixture of Bismarck’s brutality and Falk’s conceptual purity undoubtedly made the actual attack on German Catholicism more damaging and politically more disastrous. Falk really believed in the ideal of separation of church and state; Bismarck wanted to assert his power. By appointing Falk Bismarck indirectly made certain that his old Prussian Conservative friends would join the Catholics in defence of their Protestant patriarchal control of schools and society.

  From 1872 on Falk introduced a series of stringent pieces of legislation in both Prussia and Reich. Even before his appointment an amendment to the Reich penal code made it an offence, punishable by up to two years of prison, for clergymen to make political statements from the pulpit that might endanger the peace. This anti-clerical gag law continued to be part of the German criminal code until 1953, when the Catholic Centre, now in its new guise as the Christian Democratic Party, under the old Centre politician Konrad Adenauer, finally abolished it.23

  The next battle was fought out in February 1872 in the Prussian Landtag over the Schulaufsichtsgesetz (the School Supervisory Law), which required the replacement of clerical by state supervision in ‘all public and private institutes of instruction’. Here was an issue that pitted Liberals against Catholics and also increasingly conservative Protestants. Eduard Lasker, the indomitable little liberal purist, challenged the house by saying that the law abolishes ‘the school supervisor with rights of his own, who has the audacity to say to the State: “You have no right to prescribe for me in what way I supervise and direct the school.”’24

  The theatrical quality of the occasion was heightened by the contrast among the speakers and the intensity of the debate. All the leading speakers of the parties went to the rostrum but the main bout was that between the 250-pound giant Bismarck, sweating and swaying, and the tiny, blind Windthorst with his green, glass spectacles and his minute shape. He unnerved and annoyed Bismarck. On 24 January the Catholic deputy, August Reichensperger noted with satisfaction in his diary:

  Bismarck’s irritation seems to me to be based on the fact that his project of a German national church has shipwrecked, and that the believing Protestants, for whom Windthorst in Hanover forms the bridge, are more and more joining ranks with us.25

  On 30 January Bismarck launched a direct attack on the Catholic Centre Party in the Landtag and ended in a duel with Windthorst, which Bismarck openly lost. Windthorst caught him in one of his inconsistencies:

  BISMARCK: When I returned from France, I could not consider the formation of this fraction in any other light than as a mobilization of a party against the state.

  WINDTHORST: I do not know what the Minister-President regards as struggle against the state … But, gentlemen, I make so free as to suppose that it is not yet correct that the Minister President is the state … When, however, the government jerks from Right to Left at such a suspiciously hasty tempo as is happening now (for today the Minister President has proclaimed unconditionally the rule of the majority) … I must take my ministers from the majority [he said] … therefore I can take no Catholics, because Catholics are not in the majority, … the Zentrum’s support is not possible.26

  On 8 February Windthorst in turn attacked Bismarck for abandoning conservative and monarchical principles with the School Inspection Bill.

  These words affected Bismarck visibly. His hands shook and he needed both of them to hold a glass of water. He replied: The deputy from Meppen with an adroitness that is too perfect … arranges the words I have spoken to suit his momentary ends … I have passed my years-long examination in the service of the monarchical principle in Prussia. For the Herr Deputy, that is still—or so I hope—to come.27

  The next day, Bismarck returned with a new attack on the Guelphs (a term to describe the Hanoverian royal family and its followers such as Windthorst) and accused the ‘Guelph leadership’ of stirring up trouble. He attacked Windthorst personally:

  Before the Centre Party had been founded, there existed a Fraction which people called the Meppen Fraction. It consisted, as far as I can recall of one deputy, a great general without an army, but in the meanwhile he has succeeded like Wallenstein to stamp an army out of the ground and ring it round him.28

  and concluded that: ‘for Guelph hope can only succeed when strife and subversion reign.’ The President of the House, Max von Forcenbeck, gave Windthorst unlimited time for a point of personal privilege. Windthorst replied:

  such an excess of personal attacks has been directed against me, and indeed with such violence, that I am beginning to believe that I possess a significance of which, until now, I had never dreamed. [Laughter.] … For my part, you may be assured: I will NOT submit to this pressure. Nevertheless, it is something as yet unheard of in parliamentary history that a man of this rank spent nearly an hour in order to attack me personally.29

  In the debate next day, 10 February 1872, the Catholic deputy, Hermann von Mallinckrodt, replied to Bismarck:

  We are proud to have in our midst so distinguished a member as the Deputy from Meppen. [Bravo!] They have annexed a pearl, Gentlemen, and we have brought that pearl into its proper setting [Very good!—in the Zentrum; and great, continuing laughter elsewhere.]30

  To which Bismarck, always quick-witted, replied mockingly:

  The honourable gentleman has called the Deputy from Meppen a pearl. I share that view in his sense completely. For me, however, the value of a pearl depends very much on its colour. In that respect I am rather choosey.31

  On 13 February 1872 the School Supervisory Law passed the Landtag by 207 to 155
.32 The relatively narrow majority in the lower House where the Centre only had 63 deputies indicates how much opposition the bill evoked among Conservatives. It had been a victory of sorts for Windthorst. On the day of the vote, Eberhard Freiherr von Brandis, a former Hanoverian general, said with evident delight to Sir Robert Morier

  What do you say about Bismarck’s and Windthorst’s duel? We rather think that Windthorst has had the best of it. He has become a giant, having been a liliputian and Bismarck is diminished in size and power.33

  On 5 March 1872, the day before the School Supervisory Law went before the House of Lords, Hans von Kleist went to dinner at the Bismarcks and after the other guests had gone, they discussed the School Supervisory Law. ‘In the course of the conversation the excited Prince grabbed a letter opener and made a gesture as if to divide the table cloth and cried, “if that’s the way things are, it’s all over between us.” The die had been cast. Nothing remained to Kleist but to take his hat and go.’34

  The next day, 6 March, Bismarck opened the debate on the School Supervisory Law in the House of Lords. He dismissed the objections of believing Christians, his old friends, about the assault by the secular state on Protestant religious education. He rejected Kleist’s assertion that ‘through this law the government of the state opens the gates through which the turbulent waters of unbelief in time will flood from the de-christianized State over the schools. I disdain even to go into such ideas.’ The Law passed 126 for 76 against. Among the yes voters were Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, and Eberhard Stolberg, Kleist’s brother-in-law.35

  The reaction among Bismarck’s former allies was bitter and angry. One of them, Andrae-Roman, expressed that bitterness in a remarkable letter of 15 February 1872 to Ludwig von Gerlach. Ferdinand Ludwig Alexander Andrae (1821–1903) came from a solid bourgeois family in Hanover. He went to Berlin and to Bonn as a student to learn agricultural theory and with a command of scientific agronomy he bought an estate in the Pomeranian district of Kolberg called Roman and from then on called himself Andrae-Roman. He met and became a close friend of Bismarck through the Pietist circle around Moritz von Blanckenburg. Andrae-Roman cut a unique figure as a bourgeois landowner and a Hanoverian among the Prussians but he served for years in the Conservative Party in the Prussian Landtag.36 As he wrote to Gerlach,

  It is hard to see a man like Bismarck go down hill in big slides, he who openly confesses himself true to principles that he so victoriously fought with your help. History cannot offer another example, somebody for whom twenty years ago even Stahl was not conservative enough. I recall going to see him in Frankfurt—it must have been 1850 or 1851 one morning rather late and I found him in bed. Frau von Bismarck explained he had slept badly and for hours had tossed and turned with hefty groans and finally cried out: ‘He is after all only a Jew!’ namely, Stahl as he then declared and said to me later. ‘What do you think would have become of Stahl if he had not had Gerlach at his side? Never a Prussian Conservative.’37

  The Kulturkampf poisoned Bismarck’s relationships with his old friends and embittered the Catholic minority in the new Reich; Bismarck and Falk pushed on nonetheless. On 1 August 1872 Kleist wrote to Schede,

  It’s not easy in such a struggle to stand up against the government, which has engaged itself so deeply. Apparently the next Landtag will have legislation before it against the Bishops. It horrifies me. Krements’ sentence is right: ‘Obey God more than the government.’ On the other hand those measures of the Catholic Church, or a Bishop, to defend the doctrine of infallibility cannot be identified by us with God’s commandments. The state law must have precedence.38

  In the midst of these grand battles a small political event needs to be recorded. On 18 April 1871 Robert Lucius von Ballhausen (1835–1914) introduced a bill to speed packages to troops and officers in occupied France. Delbrück gave an evasive ministerial reply. Bismarck appeared late and invited Lucius to come to the Ministers’ room behind the Speaker’s podium.

  He spoke at such length and with such an absence of reserve, to me a total stranger, that I was surprised. It was the first time that I had talked to Bismarck alone and in his lively and confidential way he treated me as if I were an old acquaintance. It made a remarkable and captivating impression on me.39

  This first conversation between the Chancellor and the 35-year-old medical doctor and landlord turned into a lifelong relationship which Lucius recorded in copious notes, published in 1920, unedited, six years after his death. Lucius had gone into politics after 1866, as an agricultural protectionist and lapsed Catholic; he joined the German Reich Party and served in the Landtag and Reichstag for many years.40 Lucius moved quickly into the charmed circle of those who enjoyed the privilege to know the Prince at home. On 9 May he received an invitation this time to a political soirée and described how these occasions worked:

  he [Bismarck] gathers a large group of people around him and simply dominates the conversation, while those sitting next to him kept the threads by as it were spinning him more occasions to carry on. This sort of conversation clearly gives him pleasure and he never tires of it. The groups around him were often very interesting people. He treated every single guest with the same friendly warmth and concern. People formed groups casually and at will. There reigned an absolute social equality in the way guests were treated and a splendid hospitality without pretence or affectation. In the many years afterwards, as I became an intimate of the house, I never noticed the slightest difference in his behaviour. He showed every guest the same courtesy and consideration. At most he might make a distinction by age.41

  At other occasions and in private, Bismarck might do nothing but complain about how wretchedly he felt physically. This happened to Waldersee, who called on Bismarck on 27 April 1871, and found his host in bad shape.

  I went yesterday evening to Bismarck. He looks really miserable and complains also about his health. The hours in which he gets to sleep are between 7 and 12 a.m. He only really feels well for the first time each day late in the evening and then he gets to work.42

  On 10 May 1871 Germany and France signed the peace treaty in Frankfurt. Bismarck and Count Harry Arnim, German Ambassador in Paris, signed for Germany.43 Two days later, Bismarck received a hero’s welcome in the Reichstag. Gustav von Diest (1826–1911) a strict Evangelical, noted with distaste how his ‘whole nature changed … He no longer tolerated contradiction; he was accessible to flattery; but even the smallest, alleged disregard for his ego and his position exasperated him.’44 Everything exasperated him. He lost his temper with the Reichstag about Alsace and Lorraine. He lost his temper with Moltke and the generals about the victory parade scheduled for 3 June, and blamed the Queen for not wanting to interrupt her holiday as the cause.45

  Prussia and the Reich had to be reorganized in all sorts of ways and the Emperor-King had to approve hundreds of appointments—down to the level of heads of teacher-training institutes. All that hugely increased Bismarck’s workload. Everyone of those appointments came to Bismarck either from the Household Minister down or from Delbrück in the Reich Chancellery up. Hence even in Varzin, the daily burden of work never let up. He complained to von Mühler that a certain Lizenziat August Langer in Glogau, ‘an extremely worked up Infallibilist’, had been appointed by the Kultusministerium to be principal of the teacher training school in Habelschwerdt, a small Silesian town. Bismarck was furious. The whole idea of the abolition of the Catholic Section in the ministry had been to prevent the attitudes of the people in that department from ‘disturbing the peace in the country’. His Excellency must take care in future to put all such nominations before the State Ministry for ‘a very searching’ examination before they went for All-Highest approval.46 The great Bismarck blocked the appointment of the head of a teacher-training college in a tiny community.

  Summers brought no break from work, because monarchs went to the grand spas to take the waters and make treaties. August 1871 was no exception. Bismarck attended the Emperor in Bad Gastein and learned on
22 August that the King intended to meet Emperor Franz Joseph in Salzburg on 5 or 6 September, ‘at which I cannot be absent’.47 For some months Bismarck had been writing press releases and dispatches in favour of the Habsburgs and ordered the official organs to make clear that the constitutional crises in the ‘Austrian half’ of the now divided Austro-Hungarian Monarchy should not be understood as a crisis about nationality (which it undoubtedly was—especially Czech national rights) but about ‘political currents’ and, as in Germany, ‘both elements, the ultramontane and the socialist, are born enemies of Germany’.48 The Emperors William and Franz Joseph met informally in Bad Gastein on 24 August. Bismarck issued a notice to all German missions abroad to say that ‘the meeting of the two Monarchs can only further contribute to show the world that the disturbance in the friendly relations, to which both lands, in contrast to the feelings of the two rulers, had been pushed by their historic developments, must now be seen as a completed and finished episode.’49 ‘Pushed’ (gedrängt is the word Bismarck used) ‘by their historical developments’ very neatly evades the fact that ‘the historical developments’ stood for a war that was caused by the Chancellor who drafted the circular letter. In any event, Bismarck had the first link in place for the new conservative alliance. Between 1871 and 1879 the Austro-German friendship, carefully and patiently cultivated by Bismarck, turned into a formal alliance.

  The next step involved the Tsarist Empire and Alexander II. Here a stroke of luck helped Bismarck arrange things. The Emperor Franz Joseph decided that he would cement the new friendship with Germany by a state visit and the Emperor William could hardly say no. Bismarck had reassured the Russians again and again that Germany would not sacrifice its ties to Russia but the visit of the Austrians made the Russians uneasy. Bismarck had tried to bring those European states together ‘which had substantial numbers of Catholic subjects … for an exchange of ideas’ in May of 187250 and later had proposed a conference on combating socialism and terrorism, but it was the visit of the Kaiser Franz Joseph that made the Russians move. The Tsar decided that he would join the visit of the Emperor of Austria and so the two Emperors would visit Berlin in September of 1872.