Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  A few days later, on 4 April, newspapers reported on Bismarck’s resignation, whereupon the Emperor granted him leave of absence for a year.149 The left Liberal leader, Eugen Richter wrote to his brother on hearing the news of the furlough for a year.

  Naturally Bismarck’s retirement is our chief interest. That will produce changes in party relationships so colossal that they cannot be predicted. The tariff protectionists, who have become especially dangerous, have the greatest cause to mourn. If he actually remains away from all business for a full year, that will be the equivalent of a complete retirement.150

  The well-informed Odo Russell wrote to Lord Derby and gave him his own reading of the crisis:

  I have told you in a dispatch all about the crisis, which is simply that Bismarck is really nervous and in want of rest—and the Emperor reluctant to part with him altogether. Besides physical ill-health, Bismarck is morally upset by the decreasing support his policy suffers from, on the part of the Emperor and of Parliament, which he attributes to the Empress’s hostile influence on his Majesty, and to the Pope’s influence on the Catholic Party in Parliament, instead of attributing it to his very disagreeable manner of dealing with his Sovereign and his supporters, and to the violence of his dealing with his opponents. What he wants is the power to turn out his colleagues from the new cabinet at his pleasure—a power this Emperor will never concede to his Chancellor. At Court on Thursday last the Emperor told me he would give him as much leave as he pleased but would not let him resign. The Empress told me that Bismarck must be taught to obey his Sovereign.151

  The next day the Kaiser rejected his resignation and the appointment of a deputy on the grounds that ‘any serious substitution would make it difficult for you to return’. Bismarck told the State Ministry in private that the Kaiser regarded his request as an ‘insult and declared he would lay down his crown if Bismarck went’.152

  On 14 April Hildegard von Spitzemberg learned from Princess Bismarck that the Chancellor Crisis had been resolved and that Bismarck told her the Kaiser had

  wept like a baby and spoken of his abdication and hence his insistence on his resignation became impossible. But nobody believes—and rightly—that Bismarck could not have had his way had he really in full seriousness insisted on his resignation. Either he ought to have gone, cost what it costs, or ought not to have created the whole spectacle, which now all seems like a pure comedy—‘scaring people does not count’… in short his authority has suffered by the result of this crisis and that depresses me very much, although I rejoice personally that everything will stay the same.153

  On 16 April 1877 Prince Bismarck and the family departed for Friedrichsruh, the estate which the Emperor had given Bismarck in 1871. Bismarck had converted an old coaching inn in Aumühle outside Hamburg into a family house. In 1877 Lucius von Ballhausen visited him for the first time:

  I took the 3.20 train to Hamburg, slept there and travelled early Sunday morning to Friedrichsruh—roughly 26 kilometres from Hamburg—where the Prince and Count Herbert waited for me at the station. Very warm reception. They live only five minutes from the station in a friendly, little cottage, which would be comfortable for a family of three or four people but not for a family with seven or eight servants. The area is beautiful but opener than Varzin. We soon mounted our horses and rode for about four hours through the wood. The Prince after fourteen days of country life and quiet days seems refreshed, sleeps better and generally seems quieter in spirit. He was full of the intrigues of Her Majesty and complained repeatedly …154

  Bismarck worked in Friedrichsruh with the same ferocious energy he repeatedly claimed he no longer had. He went to Bad Kissingen. He travelled to Berlin. He wrote dispatches, conducted foreign policy with the same finesse as ever. On 6 October he moved to Varzin, where he noticed very painfully how the depression of agricultural prices had affected the profitability of the estate. He spelled it out in a conversation with Moritz Busch:

  ‘Varzin brings me nothing. It is hardly possible to sell grain because railway rates for foreign grain are too low. The same is true of timber, which realizes very little owing to the competition. Even the proximity of Hamburg to the Sachsenwald is of little use to me at present.’ Busch says there’s a rumour that Bismarck is buying an estate in Bavaria ‘Bavarian estate! I have not the least idea of buying. I have lost enough on the one I bought in Lauenburg, where the purchase money eats up the whole income of the property. How can an estate yield anything when a bushel of grain is sold at the present low price?’155

  The summer and fall of 1877 marked an important stage in Bismarck’s political career. For a while, how seriously meant we cannot say, he entertained the possibility that he might introduce Rudolf von Bennigsen, leader of the National Liberals, into his Prussian cabinet, no doubt as part of a reshuffle in which he could rid himself of ministers who had begun to irk him. Negotiations with the National Liberal party in the House of Deputies began when Bismarck asked Tiedemann to invite Rudolph von Bennigsen, its leader, to the Chancellery privately and without fuss; if that could not be accomplished right away, then to arrange a visit in Varzin. On 1 July 1877 Tiedemann wrote to von Bennigsen to explain that the Prince wished to see him without the press and public notice and hence hoped that Bennigsen could come to Berlin; if not, Tiedemann asked whether it would give rise to ‘certain misinterpretations’ and inconveniences if Bennigsen visited Bismarck in Varzin.156 Bennigsen replied two days later:

  I should hope that political ignorance has not gone so far in Germany that a visit, in my capacity of President of the House of Deputies and a party leader, to the Imperial Chancellor and Minister President at his country house in Varzin could cause misunderstanding. I am entirely prepared to pay the price of any silly misunderstandings which may arise.157

  On 30 November 1877 Tiedemann recorded another resignation crisis in a letter to his wife, one so bad ‘as we have not had for ten years and it is to be feared that it will end with the definitive resignation of the Prince’. On 7 December he wrote again that

  the Prince makes his return to the job depend on conditions which in part involved a change of personnel in the higher civil service and in part on a reorganization of the offices of the Reich. If his conditions are not accepted, he is determined to submit his resignation. He is tired of having every step obstructed either from left or right. The family and his doctor had urged him to resign.158

  At the same time as the resignation crisis Bismarck invited the leader of the National Liberals to talk about the National Liberals as a government party and Bennigsen as a minister.159 Lucius, always well informed, analysed the resignation threat and the invitation to Bennigsen with his usual clarity:

  Bismarck […] wavering in his attitude to an attempt to set up a partial parliamentary ministry … The general idea was the unification of the most influential Reich and Prussian ministries: the Chancellor and the Minister-President, the Vice-Chancellor in the Reich and also the same in Prussia, the Reich Justice Minister at the same time Prussian Justice Minister, the same in finance etc. The plan was to represent Prussian chief ministers in the Reich through directors or under-secretaries … As I heard from a reliable source, there was before the Kaiser a resignation request, which contained a kind of ultimatum and demanded the dismissal of certain palace officials. On the other hand, the long absences of Bismarck, the existing confusion in the coalition, have favoured anti-Bismarck forces … Besides there was a danger that Bismarck had screwed his demands too high for the Kaiser, especially in the delicate situation of the court and almost all family relations and thus the decision might go against him. The impertinence of the demand that he act against his own wife was very painful for somebody of the old monarch’s courtly character. All the ultramontane, high feudal elements were active in the plan to destroy Bismarck’s work.160

  If the Emperor had ever wanted to dismiss Bismarck, this would have been the moment. He had put up with constant moral blackmail: three resignation threats in a ye
ar, two within a month; constant political activity behind his back; and the Chancellor’s long absences on the pretext that he was too ill to work, etc. Yet planted articles, manoeuvres, meetings, trips to Varzin and Friedrichsruh by important people continued and the Emperor received no solid information about it all. On 29 December 1877 the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which acted as Bismarck’s house organ reported rumours of impending major changes in the Prussian cabinet. That was the last straw. The next day the Emperor—entirely understandably—wrote Bismarck a furious letter in which he complained ‘you have not communicated a single syllable on this subject’. He told Bismarck that he could not accept Bennigsen who was ‘not quiet and conservative’.161 Bismarck reacted to the rebuke with a complete psychological collapse. He put himself to a bed, like a child who had been scolded by an angry father. The letter of rebuke and the Kaiser’s ‘lack of consideration’ made him ill, sleepless, and bilious, and, as Pflanze concludes, ‘pathologically sick with anger’, at the thought that the Kaiser could write him a critical letter.162

  Here I have to stop to express some sympathy with Bismarck. His power rested on the old King, who had a wife who hated Bismarck and who gathered round her a camarilla of his enemies. In his weak position as a subject of a semi-absolute monarch he could never reach and crush that camarilla as he normally crushed and humiliated lesser opponents. He needed the King’s approval not only psychologically but practically. Bennigsen would have been the King’s minister not Bismarck’s. Thus he had put himself into a position of the utmost stress in which real forces constrained him to reenact these humiliations on a daily basis. He had only himself to blame since he had used his great powers to preserve for the King the absolute rule with which he could indirectly torture Bismarck with his own powerlessness.

  The psychic tensions made worse the real and insoluble problems. The real forces in government and society ground relentlessly on and he had less certainty that he could master them. Take parliamentary government. Had he moved after 1870 towards a parliamentary system, he could have done so. The King always gave in to his genius-minister and in that case Augusta and the Crown Princess would have been on Bismarck’s side, but that would have reduced the derivative absolute power so necessary to his ‘sovereign self’. These double and interlocked dilemmas destroyed his peace of mind and physical well-being but like an addict he had to repeat the drama again and again.

  Karl von Neumann, the Crown Prince’s private secretary, summed up the situation in a gloomy letter to Roggenbach sent from Wiesbaden on 22 November 1877:

  These are hopeless conditions in which we live, and we can hardly be surprised if independent and free natures quit the public service one after another. Resignation is still better than ruining themselves by degrading themselves to mere tools of the All-Powerful One … The Chancellor has one advantage that almost the whole world agrees with him that things cannot continue for long as they are.163

  Two days after Christmas 1877 Stosch wrote to Roggenbach to report that von Friedberg had spent three days at Varzin and heard the new plans to merge the Reich and Prussian ministries, to clear out most of the cabinet and introduce new policies.

  Friedberg asked ‘and what about Stosch?’ Answer: ‘he enters the cabinet as an independent minister’. Isn’t that gracious? The man thinks he can trample all over me and then still dispose of me freely … Another person, less adoring, who was also in Varzin and arrived just after the dog died, came home convinced that the Chancellor was already crazy or soon would be.164

  Thus ended the year 1877, Bismarck’s fifteenth in power, at the lowest point in his career. Neither the Chancellor nor his enemies knew what to do next. Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister in the 1950s and early 1960s, was once asked by a journalist what might blow a government off its course and replied ‘events, dear boy, events’. In Bismarck’s case the events of 1878 had the opposite effect. A lucky combination of events gave him and his policies a sudden new direction and new life.

  10

  ‘The Guest House of the Dead Jew’

  At 12 I found him at lunch, as fresh and cheerful as possible, after he had once again spoken in the Reichstag, (which they now call the ‘Gasthof zum toten Juden’).

  Baroness Spitzemberg, 15 March 1884, Spitzemberg, Tagebuch, 205

  On 11 January 1878 Bill, Bismarck’s son, told Tiedemann that the Kaiser was ‘very angry’ because Count Eulenburg ‘as a joke’ had shown him the new cabinet list composed of the most prominent National Liberals and Progressives—‘Bennigsen, Forckenbeck, Stauffenberg, Rickert etc.’1 On 18 January 1878 Tiedemann on orders from Bismarck had a meeting with Bennigsen, who regarded his appointment to the ministry as ‘beyond doubt’ but insisted on ‘one or two colleagues from the National Liberal party’ joining the cabinet with him.2 On 19 January 1878 Tiedemann travelled to Varzin to report on the meeting. A week later in Berlin, Rudolf von Bennigsen told Lucius at a parliamentary dinner that the Liberals held two trump cards:

  1) the rising need for new money which cannot be satisfied without our help;

  2) the approaching end in two years of the Septennat [the seven-year Army bill which fixed the financial contribution and the size of the army—JS]. … If an understanding is now reached between parliament and government, a steady development will be guaranteed for the next twenty years; if not, incalculable complications could ensue.3

  On 18 February the National Liberal caucus met. Julius Hölder, a deputy from Württemberg, was there and recorded the event in his diary. Hölder belonged to the pro-Bismarckian wing of the National Liberals in the Reichstag but in Württemberg’s parliament often curbed the enthusiasm of the Bismarckians on state level.4 Now Hölder accepted that a showdown with Bismarck had to be faced because

  a truly responsible government is necessary, one in close touch with the Reichstag’s majority … the grant of new taxes must be kept in hand as a means of pressure not only against the Bundesrat but also (as it appeared to me, at least according to the sense of their remarks) against Bismarck and the Kaiser in order (briefly said) to force a parliamentary administration of the Reich. In particular, the finances of the Reich and Prussia must come into one person’s (Bennigsen) hands.5

  This moment falls into the category devised by the late A. J. P. Taylor to describe German history: ‘a series of turning points where nothing turns’. Had Bismarck raised an eyebrow or lifted a finger of approbation, three National Liberals would have joined the cabinet and Germany might have moved slowly towards a more parliamentary regime. Bismarck would have shared power, made compromises, and accepted opposition as a necessary element in all political life. He would have surrendered his dedication to a semi-absolutist monarchy and settled for less than complete control. Can Bismarck ever have considered such a possibility? There is no evidence that he did and much that he could not have. The negotiations with Bennigsen fell into the category that Morier called ‘his combinations’, a move on the chessboard, never more.

  Before Bismarck’s motives could be tested, events came to his aid. On 7 February Pius IX died. Suddenly Bismarck had room to manoeuvre. Peace with the Vatican in exchange for pressure on the Centre to get rid of Windthorst? A possible Blue-Black (Conservative-Catholic) majority in the Reichstag to move toward protectionism and conservative schemes of government? Above all, he could get rid of the Liberals, too bourgeois, too pedantic about rights and representation. He suddenly felt much better, and on 14 January he returned to Berlin. He reappeared in the Reichstag for the first time for months. On 19 February Bismarck made his ‘honest broker’ speech in which he invited the Great Powers to a conference on the Russo-Turkish War to be held in Berlin. Three days later, on 22 February 1878, Bismarck announced to a startled Reichstag that ‘My aim is a national tobacco monopoly … as a provisional measure and a stepping-stone …’6

  The National Liberals were appalled and placed in a dilemma. A few weeks earlier Bismarck had been chatting with Bennigsen about the terms for three Na
tional Liberal ministers in the Prussian cabinet and now he came out for state intervention and a repudiation of the free market, then and now an essential liberal demand. Bennigsen wrote to Max von Forckenbeck, the president of the Chamber, to ask: ‘Do you not agree that we cannot participate in setting up this monopoly? If so, I shall go to the Chancellor and tell him that our negotiations are at an end.’7 In the Prussian State Ministry his Finance Minister and Vice-President Otto Camphausen (1812–96) resigned because he could not accept interventions in free trade.8

  In these tense days, Ludwig Bamberger, the Liberal finance expert and long-serving Reichstag deputy, sat opposite Bismarck at a dinner and recorded from across the table certain features of his face and conversation:

  Behind the curtain of his heavy moustache one can always only partly observe him. With his usual chattiness there appears something soft and always lightly smiling across his broad lips, but directly behind lies something powerfully tearing, definitely like a predatory beast. This charming, lightly smiling mouth can open suddenly and swallow the interlocutor. He has a bulging chin, an upside-down teacup of flesh, with the convex side turned outward. The eyes are mistrustful/friendly, lurking/bright, cold/flashing, determined not to reveal what goes on behind them unless he intends it. Though he had given two long speeches in the Landtag, he chatted from 5.30 to 8.30 without a pause, listened only to himself and will not be distracted from the thread of thoughts that he spins.9