Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  In spite of the Emperor’s reservations, Bismarck went to Vienna, where he received the treatment reserved for modern superstars. He was mobbed at railway stations, huge and cheering crowds gathered along his carriage routes in Vienna. Over the two days, 23 and 24 September 1879, Bismarck and Andrassy negotiated a treaty with very limited terms: if either treaty partner were attacked by Russia, that would trigger the casus foederis, which meant that it would have to intervene. If either power were attacked by another power, the other would maintain benevolent neutrality unless Russia joined the attacker. If that case arose, then the other partner would have to fight. The provisions so designed ensured that Austria would not get involved in a second Franco-German war for the defence of Alsace-Lorraine. Bismarck wanted more and Andrassy refused to yield it. At one point, Bismarck lost his temper and he leaned his great bulk over the Austrian and said with menace ‘either accept my proposal or …’. Andrassy remained silent, and Bismarck laughed as he finished the sentence, ‘otherwise I will have to accept yours.’88 The official Provincial Correspondence recorded the highly laudatory articles in the Vienna papers and the warm welcome the press had given to the new Austro-German entente.89

  On 25 September Bismarck returned to Berlin and had an extremely difficult audience with the Emperor. After a long emotional conversation, the Emperor gave in and remarked afterwards that ‘Bismarck is more necessary than I am.’90 On 29 September Bismarck addressed the Prussian cabinet for two and a half hours on the Austrian treaty and Robert Lucius von Ballhausen, now Minister of Agriculture, heard Bismarck in full flow, the experience that Stosch in 1873 had described as an ‘enchantment’. Lucius wrote that Bismarck had held the cabinet ‘absolutely enthralled … All the ministers support the Austro-German dual alliance as a recreation of the old German Confederation in a new more modern form.’91 On 5 October Bismarck held another cabinet meeting before which Lucius heard Bismarck read out his resignation request which he had prepared if the Emperor had not given in on the treaty with Austria. ‘His Majesty had in the meantime written him all sorts of soothing remarks … they had never had any serious differences in the seventeen years of joint work and joint achievement. Bismarck laughed out loud about this comfortable memory. Now once again peace has been restored.’92 On Tuesday 9 October he left for an extended stay in Varzin.93 The Austro-German Treaty, signed on 7 October, remained secret.

  While Bismarck walked the woods at Varzin, another crisis broke out, this time a wave of public anti-Semitism, which completed the end of the liberal era and began another stage in Germany history that ended in the Holocaust. Bismarck played a vital role in the process and he welcomed it. He shared, as we have seen, the visceral hatred of Jews among the Prussian Junkers, though he made exceptions for a few Jews such as Lassalle or, for a while, Friedenthal, Friedberg, and Bamberger. In 1811 Ludwig von der Marwitz attacked the Prussian reform movement and its liberal aims because they would end in a Judenstaat. No Junker dissented from that view and Bismarck shared it. His Pietist friends shared it because Jews could have no place in a Christian state but, as Bismarck abandoned the Christian state in the name of the secular state, he retained the unspoken belief, still widely and equally unconsciously held in today’s Germany, that ein Jude cannot be a German. In 1850, in an essay called ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (untranslatable but roughly ‘Jewishness in Music’) Richard Wagner gave that view a new sharpness by arguing—even before Darwin—that Jews by race could not express true German art; they could not be more than parasites on authentic German creativity. Wagner also saw ‘the Jew’, as von der Marwitz and Bismarck did, as the embodiment of commercial life. Wagner declared:

  According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.94

  According to Wagner, ‘the Jew’ (always in the abstract) corrupts art by turning it into a market for ‘art commodities’ (Kunstwarenwechsel). This theme, repeated ad nauseam, reflects the romantic distaste for the fact that even a genius has to sell tickets. Wagner’s radical anti-capitalism was directed at Jews and the key figure, of course, was Nathan Meyer Rothschild and his brothers:

  in this respect we have rather had to regret that Herr v. Rothschild was too keen-witted to make himself King of the Jews, preferring, as is well known, to remain ‘the Jew of the Kings.’95

  In Wagner’s view, ‘The Jew’ corrupted morals and culture by money. The message would be transformed into racial terms in the arguments used by the Nazis. The connection is there, however often Wagnerians try to deny it. ‘The Jew’ corrupted pure speech. Jews were unable to speak German properly. The word mauscheln is a German verb which is defined as ‘mumble’ in modern, politically correct, German dictionaries, but the real definition is ‘to speak like a Jew, sound like Yiddish’. Wagner here too was a pioneer:

  But far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech; and this is the essential point at which to sound the Jewish influence upon Music. The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien … The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew’s production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation’s tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber (eines unerträglich verwirrten Geplappers); so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

  When Wagner invented modern anti-Semitism in 1850, he had to conceal his identity by writing anonymously. When he republished the essay in 1869, he could use his own name, because the attitudes he pioneered had become widely held.

  Wagner was the first prophet of modern anti-Semitism, because his gigantic artistic achievement, like Nietzsche’s philosophy, rejected reason, free markets, private property, capitalism, commerce, and social mobility, just those very attributes of the modern world that Bismarck and the Junker class loathed. They were joined by the very large artisan class, which had never accepted free markets and free entry into the trades called Gewerbefreiheit. This restrictive attitude to trades and crafts and who may practise such enterprises continues to the present in the defensive attitudes of the German Handwerkerstand. The origins of this powerful craft-guild mentality come from the fact that Germany—uniquely in Europe—had disintegrated into thousands of little political authorities, whose princes and senators lacked the power to suppress guilds and corporations. When the French Revolution cleared away the mini-states of the old Reich, and abolished all closed corporations, it left a legacy of dissatisfaction and rage among the artisans at their lost privileges which never died away. Anti-Semitism was thus endemic in large sectors of the German Protestant population and in Catholic regions it belonged to Catholic doctrine until the Second Vatican Council and the papacy of John Paul II.

  The most important novel of society of the nineteenth century spread the picture of the repulsive Jew beyond the circles of those who read music journals. In 1855 Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit) appeared and became one of the best-selling novels of the period. The book sang the virtues of the new German mercantile class. Its hero Anton Wohlfahrt (the name means ‘welfare’), the honest and worthy young man from humble beginnings, rises to wealth and prestige in the new commercial world because of his bourgeois virtues. The anti-hero is the Polish Jew from Ostrau, Veitel Itzig, who begins his career at the same time. Itzig has every vice in contrast to Anton’s virtues; he is vulgar, servile, and sly, where Anton is upright, correct, and honest.

  He [Itzig] understood what always counted as the highest in this society, how to give his obsequious
humility a touch of farce, and was a master of the absolutely most tasteless bows and scrapes. He had the science to turn old brass into silver gilt and old silver to high polish. He was always ready to buy worn-out jackets—which passed among the initiate for the highest cunning.96

  The book, a huge six-volume work, paints Jews and the Jewish community in such loathsome and lurid vignettes that it could pass for Nazi propaganda. There is, however, hope, the son of Itzig’s boss, Herr Ehrental (again a sly joke—valley of honour), Bernhard Ehrental has become assimilated and German. Freytag sketches him as a positive and sympathetic character, the ‘reform Jew’.

  For some observers, the Germanized Jews were worse than the Veitel Itzigs, because at least the Polish Jews stood out. In 1865, one of the main newspapers of the Protestant church could write this about reform Jews:

  The true reform Jew is a thoroughly specific and peculiar being of a particular smell and taste. Even among the rodents which gobble and slobber everything and leave traces of their gluttony, there is a variation in the degrees of their repulsiveness. The mouse with its gnawing tooth is not as odious as the caterpillar with its soft, cold body and countless legs, or the snail which leaves behind its thick slime and always arouses disgust. Both are sometimes at large and eat up everything which is green, so that nothing remains but the bare stalks. Similarly, the reform Jews gnaw away at everything which is still green in human life, at everything which warms the soul, which is beautiful, which is lofty and lovely, and, if it were up to them, nothing would be left over but bones and brushwood.97

  The Nazis could not better this piece of Protestant hate literature.

  Jews had become prominent in the industrial and commercial boom economy of the Gründerzeit. Fritz Stern gives some numbers for the concentration of Jews in certain professions and activities. In 1881 the Jews of Berlin represented 4.8 per cent of the population but 8.6 per cent of writers and journalists, 25.8 per cent of those engaged in the money market and 46 per cent of its wholesalers, retailers, and shippers. In 1871 43 per cent of the residents of Hamburg earned less than 804 marks but only 3.4 per cent of the Jewish population belonged to this group. Ten per cent of all students enrolled in Prussian universities and even higher in the gymnasia were Jewish.98 Peter Pulzer points to other areas where Jews were very strongly over-represented. In 1887 in Prussia Jewish lawyers made up 20.4 per cent of the profession, Catholics with thirty times the population had only 26.3 per cent.99 Jews stood for liberalism. Pulzer has assembled the party affiliations of all Jewish members of the Reichstag between 1867 and 1878. The total amounted to twenty-two, of whom six were baptized Jews like Karl Rudolf Friedenthal, Bismarck’s Minister of Agriculture. Of these, only one was a conservative, two were members of Bismarck’s Reich Party, the rest were liberals of one kind or other.

  Jews in politics, the law, the universities, and journalism gave offence to those who cared but Jews in banking and finance greatly worsened the situation. W. E. Mosse in his pioneering study Jews in the German Economy shows how influential Jews were in this area. Jews dominated private banking in the 1850s and 1860. ‘With the doubtful exception of Gebr. Schickler, there are no Gentile houses to compare with [them].’

  Mosse supplies a list of the major German cities and the bankers in them:

  Berlin: Mendelssohn & Co., S. Bleichröder, F. Mart. Magnus, Robert Warschauer, and H. C. Plaut;

  Frankfurt: M. A. von Rothschild, Erlangers, Speyers, Wertheimers, Goldschmidts;

  Mannheim: W. H. Ladenburg & Söhne and Hohenemser;

  Cologne: Sal. Oppenheim;

  Hamburg: Heines, Behrens, Warburgs;

  Breslau: Heimanns;

  Dresden: Kaskels;

  Mainz: Bambergers;

  Munich: Hirsches, Seligmanns, Kaullases, and Wassermans.100

  The super-rich had a disproportionate share of Jewish millionaires. Prussia has to serve as surrogate for Germany as a whole because it had income tax whereas the Reich as such had none. The tax returns for 1908 show that ‘of the 29 families with aggregate fortunes of 50 or more million marks, 9 (31 percent) were Jewish or of Jewish origins.’101 Of the six names at the top of the table two were Jews.

  Benjamin Disraeli, who cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, gives us a vivid description of a visit to one of the super-rich in 1878, Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichröder, whose mansion he visited during the Congress of Berlin:

  The great banker of Berlin is Mr Bleichröder. He was originally Rothschild’s agent, but the Prussian wars offered him so great opportunities that he now almost seems to rival his former master. He has built himself a real palace, and his magnificent banqueting hall permitted him to invite the whole of the Plenipotentiaries and Secretaries of Embassy and the chief ministers of the Empire. All these last were present except P. Bismarck, who never appears, except occasionally at a Royal table. Mr Bleichröder, however, is Prince B’s intimate, attends him every morning and, according to his own account, is the only individual who dares to speak the truth to his Highness. The banqueting hall, very vast and very lofty, and indeed the whole of the mansion, is built of every species of rare marble, and, where it is not marble, it is gold. There was a gallery for the musicians, who played Wagner and Wagner only, which I was very glad of, as I have rarely had an opportunity of hearing that master. After dinner we were promenaded thro’ the splendid saloons and picture galleries, and a ballroom fit for a fairy tale, and sitting alone on a sofa was a very mean-looking little woman, covered with pearls and diamonds, who was Madame Bleichröder and whom he had married very early in life, when he was penniless. She was unlike her husband, and by no means equal to her wondrous fortune.102

  This kind of extravagance gives rise to ill feeling in any society but the public rarely worry about it until things begin to go wrong. After the crash on the Vienna stock exchange things went very wrong indeed. August Sartorius von Watershausen, whose massive study of the German economy in the nineteenth century still commands respect, gives us startling figures of the ferocity of the collapse and the length of the first phase of the crash. In 1872 the 444 largest listed companies had a nominal worth of 1,209 billion marks. By 1879, they had fallen to 400 billion. Industrial prices plummeted between 1873 and 1877. In marks per ton Westphalian iron fell from 120 to 42, steel rails and Bessemer steel from 366 to 128, and iron bars from 270 to 122.103 Sartorius calls 1879 the ‘deepest point’ in the depression era. This necessarily led to a struggle for survival in heavy industry where the massive scale of capital investment needed for an iron foundry or Bessemer steel plant meant that heavy fixed costs had to be assumed before a bar or ton was sold. These fixed costs weighed even more heavily when prices fell and competition pushed them lower. Heavy fixed costs forced really big enterprises to try to combine to cut ruinous competition, and cut the one marginal cost which can be shed: labour. The second half of the Great Depression shows this clearly. Between 1882 and 1895, the number of large companies (those employing 51 or more persons) rose from 9,974 to 19,953 and in employment terms 1.61 million to 3.04 million and of those companies with more than 1,000 workers, the number doubled from 127 to 255, and employment rose from 213,160 to 448,731.104

  Hans Rosenberg’s classic work Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit of 1967 explored the interaction of economic change and what we would now call mentalité. He noticed a fundamental change in the nature of anti-Semitism:

  In the course of the trend period 1873 to 1896 a revolutionary change took place in the character, intensity and function of anti-Semitism … in numerical growth, in qualitative restructuring and social location of economic anti-Semitism, in the rise of racial anti-Semitism and in the emergence of political anti-Semitism … Thus the trend period of the Great Depression was the great foundation stage and the first epochal peak of modern anti-Semitism. There followed a decline during the very satisfying high industrialization era between 1896 and 1914.105

  This can be seen in the emergence of a new kind of journalistic exposé—the financia
l scandal articles and books in which Jews are the villains. In 1874 the Gartenlaube, a popular middle-class weekly, published the first of this new genre of literature, the anti-Semitic article. It was called Der Börsenund Gründungsschwindel in Berlin (The Stock Exchange and Foundation Swindle in Berlin) and was written by Otto Glagau (1834–92). It began with the familiar complaint, ‘Speculation and swindle are the two powers which today sit on the throne of the world, under which civilized humanity sighs and groans, weakens and fails.’ Economists, Glagau writes, call boom and bust ‘a necessary evil’ but much of it is the work of crooks and fraudsters. The shining comet of these is ‘Dr Bethel Henry Strousberg, a son of the Chosen People from Polish East Prussia, where fox and wolf say “good night” to each other.’106 Glagau, who wrote vivid prose, outlined the collapse of the Strousberg Romanian railway company which had been launched in 1868 by a 65 million thaler loan with a 7½ per cent rate of interest by a consortium headed by Strousberg, the Duke of Ratibor, the Duke of Ujest, and Count Lehndorff and when the railroad collapsed could be bought for under 40. Glagau compared Strousberg to an anti-Hercules, ‘Strousberg, the semite, filled the Augean stable with rubbish and depravity’.107 Glagau continued the story with other articles and eventually published a book of his journalism two years later. Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) invented the word ‘Anti-Semitism’ in his pamphlet Der Sieg des Judentums über das Deutschtum written in 1878 and published in 1879.108