Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Nothing in Bismarck’s personality suggested to Bamberger that he would enjoy a parliamentary regime.

  On 20 February Cardinal Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci was elected Pope and took the name of Leo XIII. He was 68, and his reign was expected to be short. In fact, he lived until 20 July 1903, when he died at the age of 93. Although an aristocrat as Pius IX had been before him, Leo XIII took a very different attitude to the modern world. His famous encyclical Rerum Novarum of 15 May 1891, in which he welcomed the discoveries of science and the productivity of industry but asserted that human labour could not be considered as just a factor of production, set the stage for a new Catholic relation to the industrial world and its social problems. Bismarck now had a possible partner at the highest level of the church. That was the first change in the political constellation.

  The second happened a month later when on 31 March Wilhelm von Kardorff (1828–1907) had an audience with Bismarck. Kardorff, a wealthy industrialist and landlord, had been one of the founders of the Bismarckian Reich Party and had become its most eloquent orator and effective leader. He made a fabulous fortune during the Gründerzeit but swung to protectionism earlier than his party. He founded the Free Economic Union in 1874 to advocate protective tariffs and in 1876 the most important industrial pressure group, the Central Association of German Industrialists.10 When he arrived, Bismarck startled him by telling him that he now wanted ‘moderate protective and finance tariffs’ and continued:

  Earlier I was myself a free trader, being an estate owner, but now I am a complete convert and want to make good my earlier errors … I want tariffs on tobacco, spirits, possibly sugar, certainly petroleum, perhaps coffee, and I am not afraid of grain tariffs which could be very useful to us against Russia and also Austria.11

  In April Bismarck began to work on new legislation for the era in which he could dispense with the Liberals. High on his agenda was a plan to crush the Social Democratic Party which had gained votes and benefited from the long depression. He drafted a law which would have given the Bundesrat exceptional powers to suppress publications and organizations which advocated Social Democratic aims. On 24 May 1878 the Reichstag rejected the exceptional legislation to limit socialist activity, 251 to 57, led largely by Liberal opposition to the bill’s violation of civil rights.12 Bismarck’s indifference to the defeat surprised Tiedemann:

  When the Reichstag majority disturbs his plans, he usually does not lack caustic remarks in airing his displeasure. But this time he limited himself to a few joking remarks about the unfortunate ministers whose duty it had been to defend the ill-fated bill.13

  For once the shrewd Tiedemann missed the point. The Liberals had voted against internal security. Bismarck knew that they had handed him the best weapon he could find. Again Macmillan’s ‘events, dear boy’ would soon give him the moment to use it. On 11 May 1878 a worker named Max Hödel fired three shots at the Kaiser as he rode with his daughter, the Grand Duchess of Baden, in an open carriage along Unter den Linden. Nobody was hurt and Hödel was arrested. On 2 June Dr Karl Nobiling, a failed academic, tried again from a second-story window overlooking the same avenue and this time the Kaiser was hit by pellets in three places. The wounds would not have been serious but the Kaiser was by now 81 years old.14 Tiedemann’s account of how Bismarck reacted to the news must be one of the most remarkable eye-witness pictures of Bismarck’s quickness of mind and political adroitness ever written. Here it is in full. The scene took place in Friedrichsruh that afternoon.

  As I was underway to the Aumühle and Friedrichsruh Park, I caught sight of the Prince, who, accompanied by his dogs, was walking slowly in the bright sunshine across the field. I walked towards him and joined him after a brief greeting. He was in excellent humour and chatted about his walk and on the beneficial effect which a long walk in the forest air had on his nerves. After a short pause, I said, ‘some very important telegrams have arrived’. He answered in a joking tone, ‘and they are so urgent that we have to attend to them here in the open field?’ I replied, ‘unfortunately! They contain shocking news. Another attempt has been made on the Kaiser’s life and this time the shots have hit him. The Kaiser is seriously hurt.’ With a jolt, the Prince stopped. He drove his oaken walking stick into the ground and said taking a deep breath as if a mental lightning bolt had struck him, ‘then we dissolve the Reichstag’. Quickly he walked back to the house and while walking inquired about the details of the assassination attempt.15

  The instant ‘combination’, as Morier put it, made him the most gifted political tactician of the nineteenth century. He saw in a flash that he could run a scare campaign and get rid of the Liberal Party who would be accused of lack of patriotism. He returned at once to Berlin and went to see the Kaiser in hospital. Hildegard von Spitzemberg was there when he returned:

  The Prince had just come from a conversation with the Kaiser. The strong man was so deeply moved that he had to take a drink before he could speak. ‘The old man lies there, propped up in a bed, in the middle of the room, the hands wrapped entirely in gauze and stretched out far from his body, on his head an ice-pack—a pitiful sight! Behind him there was a lamp. I found him thinner in the face but businesslike as always and as clear; it is obvious that he suffers a lot, then, although he had a lot to say on matters that really interest him, after a while he nodded to me to go away.’ From there the Prince went to the Crown Prince for several hours, who was at first annoyed that he had not been present at the hospital conversation. The Prince told Carl that the Crown Prince had demanded security for his person, because everything indicated that the Internationale was behind the two assassination attempts. They ‘want to sweep Kaiser and Crown Prince away so that a child comes to the throne and they will have a free hand’. Today there was a grand Council of Ministers. The trouble is that the case of the temporary incapacity of the Kaiser has not been considered in the Reich Constitution, and the Crown Prince cannot step in without the declaration of a full regency. There are so many decisive decisions to take: state of emergency, dissolution of the Reichstag etc. The Prince has let a snow-white full beard grow so that he looks ridiculously like his brother Bernhard. In the evening he came back to the Kaiser several times: ‘I cannot get the old man out of my mind’. So heavy and bleak was our mood, the old firm German loyalty is broken, a stain on our honour that nothing will wash away.16

  A Crown Council under Crown Prince approved the dissolution of the Reichstag in spite of National Liberal protests.17 On 30 July 1878 German voters went to the polls with a turnout of 63.4 per cent, the highest since 1871. The National Liberals lost 4.1 per cent of their vote and 29 seats, and the Progressives 1 per cent and 9 seats, while the German Reich Party, Bismarck’s party, won 57 seats, a gain of 19 seats, and secured 13.6 per cent of the vote, more than the Kreuzzeitung Conservatives, who only secured 13.0 per cent of the vote with 59 seats. The Centre, solid as always, returned the same delegation plus one new member.18 Conservatives and Catholics together now had 210 seats, eleven more than an absolute majority of the 397 seats in the Reichstag. On the other hand the two Liberal parties with 125 seats together with the 94 Centre deputies made up a majority as well. Bismarck could play off each of the main blocks against the other. The Liberal threat had been banished and, as it happens, forever. Liberal votes declined until, on 30 July 1932, in Hitler’s triumphant summer election before the seizure of power, the two great parties of 1871 had dwindled to 1 per cent each of the votes cast.

  The elections took place not only against the background of a security panic but in the immediate aftermath of the Congress of Berlin, the most glittering summit since Metternich’s Congress of Vienna. On 11 June 1878, a Tuesday evening, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Earl of Beaconsfield, British Prime Minister, arrived in Berlin. Disraeli may have been the only statesman at the Congress who matched Bismarck in cleverness and flair. They found, as we shall see, that they liked each other. The official language of the Congress was, of course, French, which Disraeli s
poke with a bad accent and the vulgar vocabulary he had acquired in his extravagant youth. Odo Russell, the British ambassador, who had been alerted by the staff that the ‘Chief’ had decided to speak French, welcomed him and used Disraeli’s favourite device to manipulate people, flattery:

  A dreadful rumour had reached him that Beaconsfield would address the Congress in French. That would be, said Lord Odo, a very great disappointment to the Plenipotentiaries. ‘They knew that they have the greatest living master of English oratory and are looking forward to your speech as the intellectual treat of their lives.’ Lord Odo tells us that … [he] never knew whether he took the hint or accepted the compliment.19

  Disraeli arrived rather unwell and at 74 somewhat fragile. He also bore the not inconsiderable burden of war or peace. The Queen and cabinet had come to the conclusion that Russian expansion had to be stopped at all costs and a fleet had been sent to the sea of Marmora. Odo Russell wrote the next day to his brother, Hastings, the Duke of Bedford,20 ‘Lord Beaconsfield seems excited, Lord Salisbury anxious and all the other Plenipos are in a nervous state which is scarcely pleasant.’21

  Disraeli had developed a close relationship to Queen Victoria and wrote to her in extravagant terms throughout the Congress. The elegant, literary, Conservative leader pleased her much more than the stern, moralizing, Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). ‘You have heard me called a flatterer,’ Disraeli said to Matthew Arnold, ‘and it is true. Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’22 This note to the Queen is not untypical:

  Distant from your Majesty in a foreign land and with so awful a responsibility, he feels more keenly how entirely his happiness depends on his doing duty to your Majesty and your Majesty’s kind appreciation of his efforts.23

  On 12 June Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria to tell her that, to his surprise, Bismarck had insisted on seeing him on his arrival.

  Accordingly at a quarter to ten o’clock, Lord Beaconsfield waited on the Chancellor. They had not met for sixteen years but that space of time did not seem adequate to produce the startling change which Lord B. observed in the Chancellor’s appearance. A tall pallid man with a wasp-like waist was now represented by an extremely stout person with a ruddy countenance on which now he is growing a silvery beard. In his manner there was no change except he was not perhaps quite so energetic, but frank and unaffected as before … He talked a great deal but well and calmly, no attempt at those grotesque expressions for which he is, or has been, celebrated, … B let us deal with the great things that concern England for England is quite ready to go to war with Russia.24

  On 13 June 1878 the Congress of Berlin opened and Disraeli described the proceedings in a long letter to Queen Victoria:

  At two o’clock, the congress met in the Radzivill Palace—a noble hall just restored and becoming all the golden coats and glittering stars that filled it. Lord B. believes that every day is not to be so ceremonious and costumish. Prince Bismarck, a giant of a man, 6 feet 2 at least and proportionately huge, was chosen President. In the course of the morning, Prince Gortchakoff, a shriveled old man, was leaning on the arm of his gigantic rival and Prince Bismarck, being seized with a sudden fit of rheumatism, both fell to the ground and unhappily Prince Bismarck’s dog, seeing his master apparently struggling with an opponent, sprang to the rescue. It was said that Prince Gortchakoff was not maimed or bitten thro’ the energetic efforts of his companion … At seven o’clock was a gala banquet at the Old Palace, a scene of extraordinary splendour. It is a real palace, but, strange to say, all the magnificent rooms and galleries of reception are where in the days of Queen Anne poor poets used to reside: the garrets. It must have been much more than 100 steps before Lord B. reached the gorgeous scene, and he thinks he would have sunk under it, had not, fortunately, the master of ceremonies been shorter-breathed than himself, so there were many halts of the caravan.25

  Before the conference, the Russian had conceded that the entire Treaty of San Stefano would be negotiable and the British had conceded that the decisions of the Congress would be unanimous, in effect, to give the Russian a veto. Odo Russell turned out to be at least as good in the flattery game as his chief, as he wrote to Hastings:

  I overwhelm Lord Beaconsfield with honours and respect and give him my place at the table as if he were the Queen or the Prince of Wales, at which he seems well pleased, for he calls me ‘his dear and distinguished colleague’ and assures me that one of his chief objects in coming to Berlin was to see my ‘dear wife who is the most agreeable woman he ever knew …’26

  Bismarck puzzled and discomfited Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the Foreign Secretary, by his odd behaviour. On 16 June Disraeli and Salisbury had been invited by the Emperor and Empress to wait on them at Potsdam, but, as he wrote in his diary, Bismarck insisted on seeing him before he left:

  Before I went down to Potsdam, I had by his invitation an interview with Prince Bismarck, which lasted upwards of an hour. What his object was, or is, I have not yet discovered. There was no business done; it was a monologue, a rambling amusing, egotistical autobiography. As His Highness had requested this interview, I would not open on any point. Lord Salisbury, equally invited, had an audience almost immediately after me and of the same surprising character … not a word of business from Prince Bismarck, either to Lord Salisbury or to myself.27

  The next day, 17 June, he had another long exposure to the oddities of Bismarck. There was a formal dinner—a very rare occasion—at the residence of the Bismarcks, as Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria:

  In the afternoon at 6 o’clock great dinner at P. Bismarck’s. All these banquets are very well done. There must have been sixty guests. The Princess was present. She is not fair to see tho’ her domestic influence is said to be irresistible. I sate on the right hand of P. Bismarck and, never caring much to eat in public, I could listen to his Rabelaisian monologues: endless revelations of things he ought not to mention. He impressed on me never to trust princes or courtiers; that his illness was not, as people supposed, brought on by the French war but by the horrible conduct of his Sovereign etc etc. In the archives of his family remain the documents, the royal letters which accuse him after all his services of being a traitor. He went on in such a vein that I was at last obliged to tell him that, instead of encountering ‘duplicity’ which he said was universal among Sovereigns, I served one who was the soul of candor and justice and whom all her Ministers loved. The contrast between his voice which is sweet and gentle with his ogre-like form, is striking. He is apparently well-read, familiar with modern literature. His characters of personages extremely piquant. Recklessly frank. He is bound hand and foot to Austria whether he thinks them right or wrong: but always adds: ‘I offered myself to England and Lord Derby would not notice my application for six weeks and then rejected it’.28

  The German Ambassador to Russia, von Schweinitz, had become seriously worried about the Congress and wrote to his wife that ‘the conference is going very badly. Everybody against Russia except us. Andrassy makes a play for old Beaconsfield, flatters him, everything he says is wonderful and will vote in everything with him against Russia.’29 Bismarck suddenly got serious, and as Disraeli recorded in his diary, took an unusual step on 21 June:

  I was engaged to dine today at a grand party at the English embassy, but about 5 o’clock Prince Bismarck called on me, and asked how we were getting on and expressed his anxiety and threw out some plans for a compromise, such as limiting the troops of the Sultan etc etc. I told him that in London we had compromised this question, and in deference to the feelings of the Emperor of Russia, and it was impossible to recede. ‘Am I to understand it is an ultimatum?’ ‘You are.’ ‘I am obliged to go to the Crown Prince now. We should talk over this matter. Where do you dine today?’ ‘At the English Embassy.’ ‘I wish you could dine with me. I am alone at 6 o’clock.’ I accepted his invitation, sent my apology to Lady Odo, dined with Bismarck, the Princess, his daughter, his
married niece, and two sons. He was very agreeable indeed at dinner, made no allusion to politics, and, tho’ he ate and drank a great deal, talked more.

  After dinner, we retired to another room, where he smoked and I followed his example. I believe I gave the last blow to my shattered constitution, but I felt it was absolutely necessary. I had an hour and a half of the most interesting conversation, entirely political. He was convinced that the ultimatum was not a sham, and, before I went to bed, I had the satisfaction of knowing that St Petersburg had surrendered.30

  The following morning, 22 June, at 10.30 a.m. Disraeli telegraphed the Queen and Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘Russia surrenders and accepts the English scheme for the European frontier of the Empire, and its military and political rule by the Sultan. Bismarck says, “There is again a Turkey-in-Europe”. “It is all due to your energy and firmness” was the Queen’s reply.’31

  A few days later, on 26 June, Disraeli sketched another vivid portrait of Bismarck for Lady Bradford, his special confidante.

  Bismarck soars above all: he is six foot four I shd think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, wh. singularly contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity. He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest of the Prussians and all the permanent foreign diplomacy, tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile. He loads me with kindness, and tho’ often preoccupied with an immediate dissolution of parliament on his hands; an internecine war with the Socialists, 100s of whom he puts daily into prison in defiance of all law, he yesterday extracted from me a promise that, before I depart, I will once more dine with him quite alone. His palace has large and beautiful gardens. He has never been out since I came here, except the memorable day when he called on me to ascertain wh[ether] my policy was an ultimatum. I convinced him that it was, and the Russians surrendered a few hours afterwards.32