Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Ministers understood the Emperor’s strong prejudices and acted to calm or allay his anxieties but they could never ignore them. As we have seen, William I chose not to dismiss his cabinets over tariffs or other questions. He conducted such meetings in what Tiedemann called ‘a free and easy form’.124 Ministers could speak their minds openly. Yet William could dismiss them at will as he could dismiss Bismarck. Why he chose to be overruled on matters by his Chancellor remains one of the most mysterious and yet important themes of Bismarck’s career and hence of this book. The constant tension between a Chancellor who could not bear opposition and a conscientious and careful Sovereign who opposed him at every step must have contributed to that sense of futility, exhaustion, and despair which Bismarck expressed again and again. Thus, on 4 January 1877 Tiedemann wrote in his diary: ‘The Prince unwell, and has cancelled all appointments.’125 Four weeks later Bismarck told Tiedemann that he was suffering from a headache on one side of his head and would have to postpone the dinner for members of the House of Deputies he had wanted to host for some time. For that he needed to be well enough to do some serious drinking. ‘If I have to eat with members of parliament, I must drink myself the courage.’126

  Foreign affairs, on the other hand, never provoked the rage, psychosomatic ailments, and physical exhaustion that domestic matters increasingly did. Not even a revived France disturbed his digestion. On 12 March 1875 the French National Assembly approved the addition of a fourth battalion to each regiment and a fourth company to each battalion. Moltke calculated that the law would add 144,000 men to the French army.127

  Bismarck turned his attention to an effort to reduce France to second-class status. Articles on a possible coalition of France and Austria began to appear and on 8 April the Berliner Post, a paper often used by Bismarck to plant stories, published a front-page article, ‘ist Krieg in Sicht?’(Is war in sight?), written by Constantin Rössler, a journalist known to be close to the Chancellor. The paper answered its own question, ‘yes, war is in sight but the threatening clouds may yet blow over.’128 The publication, Tiedemann noted, ‘aroused great excitement’.129 Odo Russell took it all calmly and assured Lord Derby that

  Bismarck is at his old tricks again alarming the Germans through the officious press and intimating that the French are going to attack them and that Austria and Italy are conspiring in favour of the Pope … This crisis will blow over like so many others but Bismarck’s sensational policy is very wearisome at times. Half the diplomatic body have been here since yesterday to tell me that war was imminent, and when I seek to calm their nerves … they think that I am bamboozled by Bismarck. I do not, as you know, believe in another war with France.130

  The crisis developed as both Bismarck and the French Foreign Minister tried to blame the other. On 21 April the French Ambassador to Germany was told by a high official in the German Foreign Office that a preventive war would be entirely justified, if France continued to rearm, indeed it would be ‘politically, philosophically and even in Christian terms’ entirely justified.131 The Prussian military also began to consider preventive war and leaked their comments. The French used the bad reputation that the Prussians now had to alarm the other powers and the Kaiser as well. On 6 May Henry Blowitz published an article in The Times, ‘A French Scare’, in which he took the French side. Lord Derby observed that ‘Bismarck either is really bent on making war, or he just wants us to believe he is bent on it.’132 The Russian ambassador to Great Britain, Peter Shuvalov, whom Bismarck preferred to Gorchakov, saw Bismarck in Berlin and on arrival at his post in London told Lord Derby on 10 May that Bismarck was suffering from sleeplessness and talked of resignation. ‘He appeared to think that all Europe was inclined to coalesce against Germany and was also much haunted by the idea of assassination … fatigue, anxiety and other causes had produced in [Bismarck] a state of nervous excitement that may explain many of his sayings and doings.’ In fact Bismarck had submitted his resignation on 4 May for the umpteenth time and with the usual phrases, ‘I am incapable of performing further the work and duties inseparable from my office, and that after 24 years of active participation in the field of higher politics … my powers are no longer adequate.’133 As usual Bismarck did not resign. The new British Prime Minister Disraeli, a Tory committed to more international activity than Gladstone, convinced the Russians to intervene jointly in Berlin to preserve the peace. Gorchakov leapt at the chance to teach Bismarck a lesson. He and Tsar Alexander travelled to Berlin to persuade the Kaiser not to go ahead with a preventive war against France, something he had no intention of doing. The visit from 10 to 13 May allowed Tsar Alexander to calm Bismarck and persuade him not resign. Gorchakov and Odo Russell confronted Bismarck on 13 May in the Foreign Ministry and tried to get him to declare publicly that he had no intention to attack France. He refused but he had lost face. He had to give in to the pressure from the Tsar and his own Emperor, the first serious reverse he had suffered. The Tsar observed that ‘one should not believe the half of what he said, for he says things that he does not really mean and are only an expression of his passions and his momentary nervous excitement. One must never take him “au pied de la lettre”.’134 On 31 December Bismarck wrote gloomily, ‘a bad year’;135 it was certainly the first in which he had been outplayed in the game of diplomacy.136

  In mid-July of 1875, a revolt broke out in Herzogovina against Turkish rule, which the Turkish authorities repressed with great brutality. The emergence again of the Eastern Question confronted the three Emperors with a dilemma. On 1 August Schweinitz reported from Vienna on proposals for collective mediation that eventually resulted in the so-called Andrassy Note written in the name of the three powers to demand reforms. With the approval of the United Kingdom and France, the Note was submitted to the Sultan, whose agreement was secured on 31 January 1876. The Herzegovinian leaders, however, rejected the proposal. They pointed out that the Sultan had already made promises to institute reforms but had failed to fulfil them.137 Within a few months, the Sultan had been overthrown but unrest continued until Abd-ul-Hamid II came to power. Revolt spread across the Balkans and in May Sir Edward Pears, the senior member of the bar in Constantinople, sent reports of atrocities in Bulgaria.

  The reports contained passages which, alas, are now only too familiar after Pol Pot and Ruanda but then marked the beginning of a development of nationalist violence that has yet to die down. The British public were horrified to read descriptions such as these:

  They had seen dogs feeding on human remains, heaps of human skulls, skeletons nearly entire, rotting clothing, human hair, and flesh putrid and lying in one foul heap. They saw the town with not a roof left, with women here and there wailing their dead amid the ruins. They examined the heap and found that the skulls and skeletons were all small and that the clothing was that of women and girls. MacGahan counted a hundred skulls immediately around him. The skeletons were headless, showing that these victims had been beheaded. Further on they saw the skeletons of two little children lying side by side with frightful sabre cuts on their little skulls. MacGahan remarked that the number of children killed in these massacres was something enormous.138

  The crisis became suddenly acute when, on 5 May 1876, the German and French consuls in Saloniki were murdered. Bismarck wanted a big naval demonstration to intimidate the Turks. France and Britain sent squadrons but Stosch refused to send any capital ships. Bismarck was furious: ‘We have a fleet that can’t go anywhere so we must have no trouble spots in the wide world.’139 From 11 to 14 May the Foreign Ministers of the Three Emperors met in Berlin to coordinate policy about Turkey. The rise of an extreme Pan-Slav party at the court of the Tsar had begun to threaten that the Russians, as ‘protector of the Balkan Christians’, would invade Bulgaria and assist the orthodox Serbs in their revolt against Turkish rule. The three Powers could not get the other Great Powers to join them so on 8 July 1876 the Tsar and Emperor Franz Joseph met at Reichstadt and agreed to divide the Balkans in the event of a collapse of th
e Ottoman Empire. The Emperors had been too hasty. The Turkish army attacked the rebellious Serbian forces in July and August 1876 and routed them. Both Disraeli and Bismarck now faced difficult decisions. The Liberals, and especially the leader of the opposition, William Ewart Gladstone, had rallied behind the angry public in their horror at the Bulgarian Atrocities. Gladstone had written a powerful pamphlet with that title. Disraeli and the Tories, on the other hand, stood for the maintenance of Ottoman Turkey since it prevented the Russian fleet from entering the Eastern Mediterranean and threatening British lines of communication with its Indian Empire. That support and its apparently immoral premiss became harder to maintain.

  Bismarck faced the equally delicate question of support for the Russians, who had not forgotten their aid to Prussia in the unification of Germany. The Tsar and Gorchakov wanted their reward in the form of overt German support for Russian intervention or at least German sponsorship of a conference at which the Russians could achieve their protectorate without war. Bismarck’s trusty ambassador in St Petersburg, General von Schweinitz, had gone on a generous leave to hunt in the Austrian Alps and could not be reached. On 1 October the Tsar used the German military attaché, Bernhard von Werder (1823–1907) to carry an urgent message to Bismarck, ‘would Germany act as Russia did in 1870, if Russia went to war with Austria?’140 Bismarck was furious that a military attaché should let himself get into such a situation. He wrote to Bernhard Ernst von Bülow (1815–79), who had replaced Hermann von Thile as State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry, in effect, Bismarck’s deputy, a private letter written from Varzin on the same day:

  Von Werder is worse than clumsy in letting himself be used as a Russian tool to extort from us an uncomfortable and untimely declaration. For the first time in his telegram the Tsar talks of ‘war against Austria’ [so in the original—JS], whereas up to now one has spoken of saving the Three Emperors’ Alliance … and now to pose the insidious question of Austria with a yes or no is a trap set by Gorchakov. If we say no, he stirs up Alexander; if we say yes. he will use it in Vienna.141

  Bismarck tried various dodges but the Russians continued to press him and, worse, they put pressure on Emperor William I, who had a close and affectionate relationship with his nephew, the Tsar. In November, the Tsar wrote to his uncle and urged him to support Russian military action in the ‘interest of Europe’. Bismarck dictated an answer a week later in which he cynically remarked that he usually heard ‘the word “Europe” in the mouth of those politicians who demanded from other powers what they in their own name dare not request’.142

  The Turkish Sultan’s forces were advancing rapidly on Belgrade. On 31 October 1876 the Russian Emperor sent the Sultan an ultimatum to halt the advance within forty-eight hours and accept an armistice of six weeks. The Porte yielded, and Britain proposed a conference in Constantinople, which the Turks accepted. Lord Salisbury, the British Foreign Secretary, travelled to Turkey for the opening session. On the same day, the Grand Vizier ‘proclaimed with thundering cannon’ a new constitution that, the Turks announced, made the conference of the powers unnecessary, and on 18 January 1877, an assembly of notables rejected the Russo-English proposal for a settlement.143 Bismarck’s efforts to avoid a choice between his two allies succeeded when on 15 January 1877 the Austrian and Russian Empires agreed in the Convention of Budapest to reconcile their measures and decisions in the event of war, and on 24 April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey.144

  The Russo-Turkish War, the sixth since the eighteenth century, turned out to be a bitter and protracted set of campaigns. The Russians invaded across the Danube in Romania and also sent a large army to the Caucasus to seize the Turkish provinces along the Black Sea coast. At first the Russian forces in the Balkans advanced so rapidly that Disraeli’s cabinet on 21 July 1877 resolved to declare war on Russia if the Russians should defy British warnings and seize Constantinople. Luckily for the British, Turkish resistance stiffened and the Russian advance stalled from 10 July to 10 December 1877. After very heavy fighting in which a reorganized Serbian army had distinguished itself, the Turks asked the neutral powers for mediation.

  During the summer of 1877, in July, when Bismarck took the waters at Bad Kissingen, he wrote the famous Kissinger Diktat (Kissingen Dictation) in which he stated his foreign policy maxims for the new German Reich:

  A French newspaper said recently about me that I suffered from ‘le cauchemar des coalitions’. This sort of nightmare will last for a long time, and maybe forever, an entirely justified worry for a German minister. Coalitions against us can be formed on the western basis if Austria joins one, more dangerous, perhaps, the Russian-Austria-French combination; a greater intimacy among two of the above would give the third means to exercise a not inconsiderable pressure on us. In my anxiety about such eventualities, not at once, but in the course of years, I would regard a desirable outcome of the Oriental Crisis if the following occurred.

  1. gravitating of Russian and Austrian interests and mutual rivalry towards the East;

  2. an occasion for Russia to need the alliance with us in order to achieve a strong defensive position in the Orient and on its coasts;

  3. for England and Russia a satisfactory status quo, which would give both the same interest in maintaining the existing situation as we have:

  4. Separation of England because of Egypt and the Mediterranean from France which remains hostile to us.

  5. Relations between Russia and Austria, which make it hard for both to create anti-German coalitions which centralizing or clerical forces at the Austrian court are somewhat inclined to pursue.

  If I were capable of work, I would perfect and refine this picture, which I have in mind, not that of the acquisition of territory but of an overall political situation in which all the powers except France need us and are held apart from coalitions against us by their relations to each other.145

  This dictation offers the most succinct representation of Bismarckian foreign policy aims after unification and can be said to explain the increasing complexity of the formal alliances that Bismarck contracted in the 1880s. His admirers wax eloquent about the ingeniousness of the scheme. Yet it failed within a year of its composition the first time he attempted to apply it. In February 1878 he announced that he intended to act as ‘an honest’ broker in the Oriental question by summoning a conference to Berlin to settle all the outstanding issues left from the Russo-Turkish War and associated changes in the Balkans. The conference took away many of the Russian Empire’s gains from what had turned out to be a very nasty and costly little war, and the Russians blamed Bismarck. True, he managed to renew the Three Emperors’ League in 1881 and 1884 but in 1887 he had to do it in secret and by violating equally solemn, binding, and secret agreements with other powers. By 1890 the Kissinger Diktat had failed and the first thing Bismarck’s successors had to do was to repudiate the 1887 Reinsurance Treaty which Bismarck had negotiated with the Russians.

  A second reason for its failure lay in Bismarck’s misunderstanding of Germany’s new position in Europe. Even in his time the German Empire had become an economic and military superpower. It had no need of these subtle and secret agreements which rested on his elaborate combinations and duplicity. Indeed as we shall see, Bismarck’s nightmares rested on the sort of pessimism and paranoia which marked his wider view of life. Its legacy led to the pessimism of his successors in 1914 who unleashed an unnecessary preventive war because they were surrounded and would be overrun. In fact, had they waited on their borders with machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery, both the French and Russian attackers would have been massacred and Germany would have won the war. Bismarck’s pessimism had deep roots in his psyche and possibly also in his social identity as well, the feeling that his class had no future.

  A third reason was Bismarck’s own personality and record as a ruthless, unprincipled warmonger. As he desperately tried to preserve the procrustean stretch between Austria and Russia and peace in the Balkans, the British ambassador in Co
nstantinople wrote to Morier and expressed the general view that Bismarck was somebody who stirred up war everywhere.

  Bismarck is aiming at upsetting every pacific solution and involving Russia in an expensive and dangerous war; he will continue to use Andrassy as his tool and he will thus prepare two great results: the weakening of Russia and the partitioning of Turkey.146

  In the midst of this great international crisis, Bismarck staged another resignation drama. On 27 March 1877 he told the State Ministry that ‘he had decided to submit a request to the Emperor for retirement. If it is rejected and only leave is granted, he proposes to ask that a fully empowered deputy be created so that he Bismarck would be relieved of responsibility.’147 Hildegard von Spitzemberg recorded her dismay at the prospect, not least because the loss of the connection to the Bismarcks meant a huge loss of prestige for the Spitzembergs:

  I cannot really believe it—the new Reich without Bismarck, 76 Wilhelmstrasse without him, one cannot imagine it but the talk was all of packing up and sending family pictures to Schönhausen. That sounds very like reality … I spoke earnestly to the Prince to ask him to give me his reasons, ‘Arrange the murder of Augusta, Camphausen and Lasker with the hangers-on and I will continue to stay in office. But this constant resistance and the constant punch bag existence wears me down’ …Then he took my hand and said ‘you will still come to see us in Varzin?’ … How loving and good and touching the great man was, as he spoke to me with tears in his eyes and stroked my hand lightly … The possibility goes round in my head, we shall lose infinitely if Bismarck goes—socially, humanly and in our position in society, for our trusting friendship with them has served us very well and made things easier. I have never concealed that from myself. The way since 1863 in exemplary loyalty I have been loved, honoured, cuddled there will never be given me anywhere again. I know only too well their great weaknesses, our views are often heavens apart, but how I love them all, how thankful, how devoted to them I am, I recognize in the deep melancholy which their departure has caused in me.148