In November 1881 Bismarck commented on the ‘Jew Debate’ at a cabinet meeting of the Prussian State Ministry:
With respect to the anti-Semitic movement he criticized it as inopportune. It had shifted its aims. He was only against the progressive not the conservative Jews and their press. He would always prefer the Socialists and Catholics to the progressives, the former aim at the impossible, which in the end must be smashed by the use of the sword; the progressives aim at a possible form of state: the republic.139
On 26 November 1881 Bismarck told Lucius that ‘the “Jew Hunt” was not opportune. He had declared himself against it but had done nothing to stop it because of its courageous attack on the progressives.’140 He had not declared himself against it: as usual, he lied about his acts.
During February and March 1880 Bismarck’s health deteriorated suddenly and dangerously. On 31 March 1880 Tiedemann found the Prince in really alarming condition:
At report, I found the Prince wretched, his tongue seemed to be lamed and his appearance horribly altered. He thinks he had a stroke last night, got no sleep, and threw up continually. Struck declared that it was nothing but a cold in the stomach with effects on the tongue. The Princess told me that her husband had eaten yesterday evening an endless mass of white wine punch ice cream and then six hard-boiled eggs. Evening council of war with the Princess, the Rantzau couple and me in the Princess’s boudoir about rules to be set for the morning. The Prince is more difficult than ever and shouted at Struck so furiously that the poor man fled, completely crushed. He had chicken soup, meat and vegetables for lunch, although Struck had quite specifically forbidden such food and equally categorically forbidden a walk in the rain in the garden. Now he sits alone in an irritable mood before the fireplace in the garden room and only wants his dogs for company.141
Bad health stirred Bismarck’s increasing irrationality and impossible rages. On 3 April 1880 the Bundesrat (the Federal Council) which Bismarck had designed to serve as his faithful legislative agency, met to consider the Reich Stamp Duty Law, not exactly the most exciting item on the parliamentary calendar. The Council began to consider its provisions, which the small states disliked, and small here includes tiny principalities like Reuss, elder Line (population 72,769 in 1910) and Reuss, younger Line (population 139,210), political units so little that they could not afford permanent ambassadors in Berlin and had to give proxies to larger neighbours. The small states particularly disliked the provision that placed stamp duty on postal transfers and on receipts given for advance payments into postal accounts. The vote on the issue produced a small sensation. The Federal Council rejected the provision by 30 votes to 28.142
Bismarck flew into one of his increasingly intemperate rages. Tiedemann went to Friedrichsruh to discuss current business and arrived late on 4 April 1880. He was awakened early the next morning by a servant who told him that the Prince wished to see him at the unexpectedly early hour of 10 a.m. He found the Chancellor in a foul mood. He had again not slept and in his rage had risen to go to work at 9 a.m. By the time Tiedemann reported for duty, Bismarck was sitting at his desk, making notes from the Almanach de Gotha. He declared that the thirty states which had voted against the provision represented 7½ million to the 38 million behind the losers. Voting down Prussia by such a majority went directly against the spirit of the constitution, he declared, and such things must never happen again:
He ordered me to draw up a direct submission to the Kaiser in which he asked to be relieved of his office. Basic idea: he could neither represent the majority decision against Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony nor could he make use of his right to address the Reichstag which Article 9 of the Reich Constitution granted representatives of the Bundestag minority … Nor was that enough; in his furious impatience, the resignation request had to be sent to the Kaiser with the greatest possible haste, and by the evening edition of the official newspaper, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, formal notice of his resignation had to be published.143
The combination of his terrible temper, gluttony, and hypochondria made him the ‘patient from Hell’. In this frame of mind he could do anything, including the absurd resignation over the stamp duty on postal transfers. He invited his neighbour and regular member of the inner circle at 76 Wilhelmstrasse, Carl Freiherr Hugo vom Spitzemberg, the Württemberg envoy to the Bundesrat, to ‘straighten the matter out’ and the conversation degenerated into a row as Hildegard recorded in her diary on 6 April 1880:
It would be laughable were it not so sad. The Prince is sick and nobody in his immediate circle calms him. On the contrary they stir him up, sometimes without realizing it, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, or out of fear. Of course he will not resign but the fact that everybody knows that makes it all into an unworthy threat—and on account of such a trivial matter. Carl was very angry and stood his ground against the Prince.144
Nothing could dissuade him and a crisis, which Tiedemann accurately described as a ‘storm in a water glass’, blew up. The little states had an attack of nerves. Ambassadors scurried about. The Kaiser rejected Bismarck’s request and the non-official press assumed that it had been just another of Bismarck’s cunning ploys. It worked. On 12 April 1880 the Bundesrat reversed its decision and restored stamp duty on postal transfers and on receipts for pre-payment of bills at postal counters. The Reich had survived the crisis. But Bismarck had again given evidence of his growing emotional instability. Everything annoyed him. ‘The Prince visits the King of Saxony, very bitter that the King had not come to him.’145 After all, what was a King of a smallish Kingdom to him? His servants and his ministers could not reason with him, and his unique power and prestige made him immune to any control other than that of the Emperor. He said no to everything that displeased him. The Prince had stopped riding and the press of business had grown. Friedrichsruh, unlike Varzin, could be quickly reached from Berlin and official visits filled the days. Nor had overeating ceased. As Tiedemann wrote in October 1880 to his wife,
I took a quick walk with Countess Marie [Rantzau, Bismarck’s daughter—JS] and prepared myself for the dinner, which in addition to dessert consists of six heavy courses. Nothing has changed. Here we eat until the walls burst.146
And breakfast was no better:
we rise at 9 and breakfast at 10: roast beef or beef steak, cold venison, wild birds, roasted pudding, etc.147
By early 1881 Bismarck’s erratic behaviour had begun to damage his projects in both the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag. Count Udo zu Stolberg-Wernigerode (1840–1910), the bluest of blue bloods, married to an Arnim-Boitzenburg and descended from Dönhoffs and related to the von der Schulenburgs, wrote to Tiedemann to complain about the ‘impossible situation’ which the German Conservative Party and his own Reich Party faced when ‘a man of the stature of the Reich Chancellor stands at the apex of business and his own party which is most willing to support him, is left completely in the dark about such questions’.148
Tiedemann had begun to face his own ‘impossible situation’ and realized it could not continue. Bismarck literally worked him to the edge of exhaustion. In an age before the telephone, the typewriter, carbon paper, the xerox, and the fax, Tiedemann spent hours, indeed whole days, copying out dictation from the Chancellor, drafting letters and piece of legislation, transcribing notes of sessions and conversations. Luckily for the historian, Tiedemann had the sort of obsessive personality which led him, ‘as a conscientious statistician’, to count the number of pages he produced on busy days or the number of times he lunched with the Chancellor (133 in 1879).149 Then there were the long residences in either Varzin and Friedrichsruh, weeks on end away from his wife and family, and the need to carry urgent documents or messages all over Berlin when on rare occasions Bismarck deigned to honour the capital with his presence. Bismarck’s hypochondria, sleeplessness, irregular hours, huge meals, terrible temper, rapid and alarming mood swings, had finally after six years taken their toll of the cheerful, flexible, and always available Tiedemann.
He too had lost his capacity to sleep and never saw his children. His wife actually sent a formal invitation to the Bismarck house inviting the ‘Herr Oberregierungsrat Tiedemann to tea at the family residence (dress morning coat) at 8 pm’. The gesture amused the Bismarcks but it sent Tiedemann a serious message. Finally, he knew that on a deeper level he could no longer survive closeness to Bismarck.
There is something great to live one’s life in and through a great man, to enter into and be absorbed by his thoughts, plans, decisions, in a certain sense to disappear in his personality. One’s own individuality runs the risk of being ground down. I yearned for freedom of movement, for independent activity, and for my own activity and creativity … When I asked him in Spring 1881 to recall his promise to arrange a suitable post, he flew into a rage and accused me in bitter, angry words, that all I thought about and worked for was designed to abandon him. It was the first and only time that he ever spoke to me in such a way. This scene too strengthened my resolve to leave the Reich Chancellery.150
Bismarck could not imagine a better or more important job than one close to his person. What could be better than to serve Bismarck? Grudgingly Bismarck found Tiedemann a suitable post and bid him farewell.
He respected nobody and paid no attention even to his royal visitors. On 20 April 1880 King Albert of Saxony had an uncomfortable hour with him:
When the king uttered a differing opinion, Bismarck changed his expression, and the king immediately yielded. It is Bismarck’s misfortune, the king declared, that he cannot listen to a contrary opinion and immediately conjectures ulterior motives. This is what happened in the vote on the stamp tax bill, when no one knew that the matter was important to him. Everyone does his will, the Kaiser first of all.151
In the end, Bismarck’s erratic behaviour led to a serious reverse. On 4 July 1880 Lucius wrote in real exasperation that the final vote on the church policy bill had been a disaster and most of the bill had been rejected.
The Prince is entirely to blame, who systematically rejected with irritation any moderate attempt at criticism. Thus the only result of this episode general annoyance on all sides and against the government … In the Bundesrat also excited negotiations took place … The Prince let loose on Minister Hoffmann and Postmaster General Stephan in such a way as if he wanted to be rid of both. The draft of the stamp duty bill had been the cause of his irritation.152
The use-and-discard employment system remained an abiding feature of Bismarck’s treatment of his subordinates. Bismarck used the occasion to abolish the Reich Chancellor’s Office and create instead a series of ‘State Secretaries’ of various departments, which at first looked like an Imperial Cabinet but appearances deceive. These state secretaries reported to Bismarck only, not to the Emperor, had no collective cabinet identity, and had no responsibility to the Reichstag. He now had a system in which he had a set of advisers and department chiefs whom he could dismiss at will, ignore when it suited him, or pretend that they had real authority when he wished to shirk responsibility for something that had gone wrong. As Friedrich Wilhelm Count von Limburg-Styrum (1835–1912) observed cynically, ‘Bismarck is to his ministers the way Don Juan was to his lovers. First he cajoles them, and when he catches them, he lets them go without caring about what happens to them.’153 Discarded ministers had the modest consolation that Prussia had a uniform for retired ministers: tailcoat with embroidery and epaulettes154 and the King often rewarded them with titles and orders, as if he felt guilty that his Minister-President had treated them so badly.
In April 1881 a family crisis broke out which fused the destructive elements in the characters of Otto and Johanna von Bismarck to seething point and broke the heart and spirit of their eldest son. Herbert von Bismarck was born on 12 December 1849, and had become his father’s most faithful amanuensis and disciple. After the obligatory Prussian military career in which he served in the very aristocratic First Dragoon Guards, he entered the ‘family business’ by joining the Foreign Service in 1874 and, as the boss’s son, rose rapidly, though nobody questioned his competence as a young diplomat. Eberhard von Vietsch in his biographical entry in the National German Biography writes of him that ‘he always stuck strictly to his father’s instructions, to whose will he subordinated himself’.155 He lived for long periods with his parents in Varzin and Friedrichsruh and served together with Christoph Tiedemann as a confidential correspondent during the late 1870s. At some point, he met and fell madly in love with the Princess Elisabeth von Corolath-Beuthen (1839–1914), one of the wittiest, most beautiful, and most popular figures in Berlin high society. Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld (1847–1921) knew Herbert and Elisabeth well and indeed the Princess had been an early flame of his. He wrote of her:
The Princess Elisabeth loved Herbert from the depths of her soul. She was a rich, gifted nature. Beautiful, vain in the way that most beautiful women are, but much too brilliant a person to succumb to vanity. She glowed with interest for the arts and was unusually musical. Proud, elegant in her character, she had gone through a hard school of life in her father’s house where the most unedifying circumstances reigned.156
Herbert and Elisabeth began a passionate affair in 1879 and Herbert convinced her to get a divorce from her husband, Carl Ludwig Prince zu Carolath-Beuthen, a Silesian prince and grand seigneur, with whom Elisabeth had been unhappily married for some time. In 1881 the divorce was granted and Herbert could now imagine a life with his beloved, who was ten years older, divorced, and a Catholic, not the ideal set of attributes to bring home to Varzin. The story had been circulating in society and finally the Vossische Zeitung, a Liberal up-market, anti-Bismarckian daily paper, got hold of it. Georg Brandes (1842–1927), the famous Danish critic and writer, had been living in Berlin for several years and wrote columns for his Danish readers. On 15 March 1881 he wrote a long piece about how Bismarck ‘had never been so unpopular with the cultivated middles classes’ as he was at that moment and how his ‘bilious outbursts and nervous symptoms’ had alienated many. He thought the cause might be deduced from the following ‘mischievous notice’, which he copied out from the ‘Voss’:
Member of the Reichstag, Prince Coralath-Beuthen, has requested a lengthy leave to withdraw to his estates—Princess Carolath has arrived in Messina in Sicily—Count Herbert Bismarck recently left Berlin. The news that he has been travelling on a special mission had not been confirmed.157
Public scandal had, indeed, made the Bismarcks angry, but there was something worse, indeed, a fatal flaw in the Princess Carolath’s character that damned her from the start. Both her sisters had married ‘enemies’ of Bismarck: one, the famous hostess Marie, known as Mimi, had married Alexander von Schleinitz, briefly Bismarck’s chief as Foreign Minister in 1861; and the other had married Walter Freiherr von Loë (1828–1908), a General Adjutant to the Kaiser and the only Catholic to rise to the rank of Field Marshall in Imperial Germany.158 In Bismarck’s eyes the connection ruled the Princess out of consideration. Her family belonged to the ‘counter-government’ around the Empress Augusta and he spoke of them as the ‘Hatzfeldt-Loë-Schleinitz clique’. No son of his could entertain relations with these hated foes, a hatred which the implacable Johanna with her card file of enemies further stirred up to white heat. Johanna declared that ‘I will fight tooth and nail to see that the society of Loë, Schleinitz and Hatzfeldt do not come to our table.’159
After her divorce, Elisabeth Carolath went to Venice, where Herbert had promised to meet and marry her. During April 1881 Herbert, caught between his love and his parents’ intransigence, hesitated. He postponed his departure for Venice and Elisabeth had a breakdown. She wrote to Philipp Eulenburg on 14 April, ‘I was so sick that it was believed that I wouldn’t live and even now I am so weak that I can scarcely take a few steps.’160 Bismarck tried to buy her off. On 23 April Bleichröder’s Italian agent called on the Princess with an offer. She rejected it with contempt, as the agent advised his chief in a telegram, ‘Princess Carolath wants no inter
ference from third parties and Prince Bismarck could write to her directly.’161 On 28 April Herbert went to see his father to make one last attempt and an epic confrontation followed. Herbert told his father that he intended to go to Venice to marry his Elisabeth. He received in recompense the full dose of the great Bismarck’s threats—he would commit suicide, he would die of a broken heart. There were tears, pleas, rage, attacks of his many illnesses. He also used his legal powers over his son to make the plan impossible on practical grounds, as Herbert wrote to Philipp Eulenburg on 31 April 1881:
In the meantime I am forbidden to leave the service. Therefore I cannot marry without permission (there is no legal possibility until after the lapse of ten months). I must remember that I have nothing to offer the princess, since according to the law of primogeniture, as recently changed with the Emperor’s approval, any son who marries a divorced woman is automatically disinherited. Since my father has nothing but the two great entailed estates, I should have no inheritance whatever. This would be all the same to me, since the split with my parents and their ruin would be the death of me.162
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