Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  On 8 June 1883 Johanna wrote to Herbert that Schweninger had prescribed a new diet for the entire family—tea or milk with eggs for breakfast, a ‘little’ fish and roast meat (no vegetables) at noon, a small jug of milk at 4.00 and yet another in the evening. To eat ‘less and more frequently’. Johanna had developed ‘a mighty trust’ and prayed that this ‘pleasant, modest, cheerful and unspeakably demanding’ personality would remain by her husband’s side for the rest of the summer.192 He stayed for the rest of Bismarck’s life and in gratitude Bismarck imposed his ‘House Doctor’ on the Berlin medical faculty, which regarded him as a charlatan and refused to speak to him. As Koch writes, ‘only in 1900 did Schweninger get a position befitting his qualifications. He became head of the medical department in the county hospital in Gross-Lichterfelde.’193

  The other great change in the 1880s lay in social policy. On 9 January 1882 Bismarck answered a parliamentary question from Georg Freiherr von Herling, a rising younger leader of the Centre, who during the First World War briefly served as one of Bismarck’s successors as Chancellor.

  Have the Allied Government plans, as part of their concern for the working classes, to expand the existing factory legislation, in particular to the end that Sunday working be abolished as soon as feasible, that female labour be further restricted and that … the legal regulation of artisans be augmented by special protective rules and the factory inspectorate’s officials charged with that task be also equipped with comprehensive powers?

  Bismarck’s reply indicated that the answer would be a qualified yes and that such provisions would be included in the large forthcoming package of legislation that the Allied governments would submit in the Spring. He then let slip in passing during a long and unusually flaccid speech one of the prime motives that had moved him:

  the perception that the mass of workers regard even the attempts of the government to improve their conditions with such deep mistrust that they prefer to vote for those parties which in the area of economic activity advocate the right of the stronger and abandon the weak in the battle against the might of Capital …194

  In other words, workers trusted left liberals like Lasker, in spite of his free market ideas, and not Bismarck. Bismarck believed that the anti-Socialist legislation had not gone far enough. Voters could vote for, and candidates could stand as, Social Democratic representatives in the Reichstag. The SPD had not been crushed in the October elections but had, in fact, gained three seats. Bismarck knew that he had to do something and he had for some time been working on a plan. In the Ministry of Trade, he found a willing, if not always biddable, civil servant in Theodor Lohmann, a Hanoverian Christian with social reformist urges. Bismarck in this case had a clearer concept of the next step than the expert, though both agreed that accident and illness insurance had to be provided. Lohmann wanted to foster Christian self-discipline; Bismarck wanted a state insurance system with compulsory contributions by employer and worker. Bismarck was right.195 In spring 1883 Bismarck launched the first part of the new social welfare legislation, an accident insurance bill and a sickness insurance bill to cover the period of thirteen weeks after accidents. On 15 June 1883 the official government gazette, Neueste Mittheilungen, saluted the passage by the Reichstag of the sickness insurance legislation:

  By the acceptance of the principle of compulsory state insurance, an end has been put to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter for those affected and formally and publicly asserts the role of the state in the provision of care for workers who have become ill in the course of employment.196

  Bismarck as a non-liberal could do what the liberal democracies found and still find hard: to see the state as the guarantor of justice for the poor.

  During the 1880s Bismarck completed the social security network by getting an accident insurance system into place which the Reichstag accepted on 27 June 1884 and an old age and disability insurance bill passed in 1889. The state system of social security gave Germany the first modern social welfare safety net in the world and still forms part of the modern German social security system, a significant achievement and entirely Bismarck’s doing.

  His restlessness continued in spite of better health. During 1884 and 1885 he again began to tinker with the institutions of the Reich. He set up a State Council. It caused much ill-will and confusion and did not work. He tinkered with the acquisition of colonies for a while in 1884 and 1885. The pressure from a new type of merchant adventurer, the illusion that colonies might supply a protected market for German goods and yield cheap raw materials, the importance of some sort of foreign policy success to maintain his reputation and the chance to exercise his wizardry, all contributed to his sudden conversion to colonialism. On 24 April 1884 the German Reich extended ‘its protection’ over Walfisch Bay and other adjacent territories which then became German Southwest Africa (today’s Republic of Namibia), Togoland, German East Africa (Tanzania today), and some islands in the Pacific. The colonies never played a significant economic or social role. By 1903, the total German population of the colonies amounted to 5,125, of whom 1,567 were soldiers and administrators.197

  On 1 April 1885 Bismarck celebrated his 70th birthday. The event became a national celebration. All over Germany there were huge festivals. A fund to purchase the Schönhausen estate as a national birthday gift met its target. The Emperor and the entire group of royal princes called on Bismarck. Lucius attended the occasion.198 The aged father, well pleased with his son, shed tears. But the son had now become old himself during the twenty-three years he had served the father.199

  Bismarck had grown old in other ways. As Phili Eulenburg noticed on a visit to the Bismarcks, the two well-known rooms had not changed save for the addition of ‘a red silk couch cover with a yellow pattern’. The rooms showed the taste of the typical Pomeranian Junker family of an earlier generation, that is, ‘its absence of taste … but then we old Prussians have always been tasteless’. On the walls Johanna had hung a selection of conventional landscapes. One by Morgenstern had been sent back to the artist because the Prince on seeing it had said ‘too many clouds’.200 He began to wear a long black tunic buttoned up to the neck around which he tied a handkerchief, which made him look uncannily like a Cathedral canon in the Catholic Church.

  He seems to have read no contemporary German literature, no Freytag, no Heyse, and apparently no Theodor Fontane either, even though Fontane confessed to the journalist Maximilian Harden in March 1894 that ‘in nearly everything I have written since 1870, the Sulphur-Yellow (der Schwefelgelbe) [Bismarck’s sulfur-yellow, cuirassier uniform—JS] goes around and, although the conversation touches him only fleetingly, the talk is always of him as of Charles or Otto the Great.’201 He never went to a Wagner opera nor listened to music much after Beethoven. He had become the national grandfather, though he alone failed to see that.

  If he was old, the Emperor and court circle were extremely old, as Phili Eulenburg wrote in his diary on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor to Bavaria in 1885. General Hartmann called them ‘walking corpses’. Eulenburg watched with particular interest ‘the old General Physician Lauer who for years has been completely mummified. He had attached to himself a fat staff doctor with vulgar legs, and the two of them stare uninterruptedly at the Kaiser with great Argus eyes. God spare us a treatment by these two for their only case is the one old man.’202 The 88-year-old Emperor continued to be the foundation of Bismarck’s power, though most of the time he refused to admit it.

  When the Reichstag opened on 5 November 1886, the speech from the Throne announced that the Allied governments would demand a renewal of the Septennat, for another seven years to begin on 1 April. Both the increase in army size under it and the cost fell within the 1 per cent of the population (now much larger than in 1871) and the 225 marks per head but the bill advanced the renewal of the previous Septennat by a year, a move evidently designed to provoke the Reichstag. Bismarck began to stir the press with threats of war and many found it conv
incing.

  On 20 August 1886 the handsome, young Prince Alexander of Battenberg had been kidnapped by a group of rebellious officers and taken from Bulgaria. On 4 September Prince Alexander announced his intention to abdicate and was allowed to take his leave of his subjects in Sofia which he did with great dignity. He returned to Germany and rumours began again that he would get engaged to the Princess Victoria of Prussia, the sister of the future Kaiser William II. On 23 October 1886 the Crown Princess wrote to her mother Queen Victoria:

  The attacks of the Berlin press on Sandro continue—it is mean, and shameful, besides utterly ridiculous. It is, of course, to flatter the Tsar, and the great man …203

  Bismarck went into a super-rage at the Crown Princess and women who intended to undermine his diplomacy by arranging a marriage with Sandro Battenberg. The Russians would threaten the Reich and war might ensue because the Crown Princess Victoria really had lurid urges of her own to have Alexander close to her.

  The crisis in the Imperial family coincided with an outbreak of trouble internationally. The appointment of the bellicose General Georges Boulanger (1837–91) as French Minister of War in 1886 caused alarm in the German General Staff. Boulanger had pledged to strengthen the army and made aggressive public speeches which earned him the nickname Général Revanche. Bismarck decided to respond in kind. On 11 January 1887 Bismarck made one of the most famous speeches of his career. The speech began with the assertion that ‘we have no warlike needs, we are so to speak a saturated state’, one of Bismarck’s most famous phrases. He continued that Imperial policy in the last sixteen years had been ‘to preserve the peace. The task was not light.’ He then reviewed the excellent results of his policies, especially the relations between Austria and Russia, both united by the Three Emperors’ League, renewed in 1884, and the Dual Alliance. France was, alas, another matter. French military improvements and the threat posed by Boulanger made it essential to increase the army and to do it now. Of course, that was hardly the real reason, since the new Septennat called for a very modest expansion in troops and funds. He then threw down a challenge to the Reichstag which nobody could miss:

  The Allied Governments stand by the full Septennat and will not deviate by a hair from it. You will never make the army dependent on shifting majorities. Annual appropriations, eliminating battalions already approved is a fantasy, and an absolute impossibility. We want an Imperial Army not a parliamentary one, which is to be commanded by Messrs Windthorst and Richter … The Allied Governments will not enter into long negotiations. The Reichstag shall accept the bill as soon as possible and in all its provisions.204

  The news that Bismarck intended to open the debate on the Septennat had spread through Berlin and the crowd wanting to hear Bismarck was so great that even Baroness Spitzemberg, well connected as she was, could not get a ticket. She dined with Count Wartensleben and

  many distinguished people, especially ministers, who told me all the details of the session so that I was almost there. The speech of the Prince, which I read in the evening, was splendid. Whatever else there will be a dissolution, if the Septennat is not approved. Woellwarth even told me today of a possible Staatsstreich [coup d’état—JS], that is, an alteration of the franchise, since better election result are not to be expected.205

  The gamble had high stakes. Bismarck hoped to ram the army bill down the throats of parliament. If they refused the peremptory demand, there would be an immediate dissolution and Bismarck would go to the country with his usual scare tactics, as he had done successfully in October 1878. That time he had broken the Liberals’ strong position and given himself room to pass the tariff and other anti-free market legislation. This time he wanted to reduce the leverage of the Centre by a ‘war in sight’ election and with strengthened conservative and National Liberal fractions he could abolish universal suffrage, formerly his best weapon but now increasingly impossible to control. On 14 January Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag and the campaign began.

  The Centre immediately recognized that it was in danger and the fraction leader von Franckenstein wrote to Monsignor Angelo di Pietro (1828–1914), nuncio in Bavaria, two days after the dissolution. Vatican circles had let it be known that it would please the Curia and speed the final demolition of Catholic disabilities if the fraction would support the Septennat:

  I do not know whether the Holy See finds it a matter of indifference whether or not the Zentrum returns in the same strength or whether the Holy See harbours the wish that the Zentrum might disappear from the Reichstag. I do not need to say that the Zentrum was always happy to act on the orders of the Holy See when it was a question of ecclesiastical legislation. I allowed myself, however, as early as 1880 to call attention to the fact that it is absolutely impossible for the Zentrum to obey directives on non-ecclesiastical legislation.206

  On 21 January 1887 Archbishop Ludovic Jacobini, the nuncio in Vienna since 1879 and the main channel between the German government and the Vatican, sent round a note to the German episcopate:

  Considered as a political party, the Zentrum is allowed freedom of action always … If the Holy Father believed that he should notify the Zentrum of his wishes in the controversy over the Septennat, then that is to be ascribed to the circumstance that connections with the religious and moral order were tied in with that affair. Above all, there were cogent grounds for believing that the final revision of the May Laws would receive a strong impulse from the government if the latter were satisfied with the Zentrum’s vote on the Septennat.207

  Windthorst had a big speech to make in Cologne and on the night of 4 February 1887 he was boarding the train when he heard the station news-boys yelling, ‘Pope against Windthorst! Pope against the Zentrum! Pope for the Septennat!’ He bought the paper and, as the train pulled out of Hanover and his travelling companion Deputy Dr Adam Bock began to read the article aloud, he discovered that it contained the text of the Second Jacobini Note. He knew that one of the German bishops, almost certainly the Bismarck fellow-traveller, Bishop Kopp, had leaked it to the Bismarck press to ‘break his back’, but as Windthorst had once warned Bismarck, he would have to rise very early indeed to outwit Ludwig Windthorst. On 5 February Windthorst rose to speak in the Gürzenich Hall, Cologne, and was received with ‘deafening applause and foot stamping’. He deftly turned the Papal letter on its head:

  If anyone has the right to rejoice it is we … Of course, it cannot be overlooked that the Holy Father wished that the law might be adopted. In this proclamation, however, he based his wish not on the material content of the bill, but rather on grounds of expediency, from the standpoint of diplomatic considerations and relations … had it been possible, we should have granted it of our own accord, without compulsion … the impossible no one can do [opposition had been in the party’s programme] … And above all, away with that wicked Guelph, with Windthorst! … But, gentlemen, old Windthorst is still alive. He will not do these people the favour of dying … And, however difficult the situations are, if we are true to ourselves and to the cause we represent, then God will also be with us. For what we preeminently strive for is God’s cause.

  Windthorst said to a friend as he climbed down from the rostrum, ‘Well, I lied my way through that one.’208 But he had survived—just! On 9 February the German bishop’s conference supported Windthorst and the Zentrum against Leo XIII. When on 21 February 1887 Reichstag elections took place, the Centre survived intact. It lost 2.5 per cent of its vote but only one seat. Ninety-eight members were returned and voted as a bloc against the Septennat. On the other hand, the two conservative parties and the National Liberals had formed an electoral ‘Cartel’ that stated whichever party had the highest vote on the first ballot would get the support of the other two in the second round. It worked. The two conservative parties gained 15 seats but the National Liberals gained 48 at the expense of the left parties, which lost 42. The Socialists held their share of the vote but because of coalitions against them between first and second ballot they only got 2.8
per cent of the seats and lost 13 deputies.209

  Windthorst had survived with his party behind him but the collapse of the left Liberals meant that Bismarck no longer needed to negotiate for his support. He came close to despair. On 22 February August Stein recorded Windthorst’s reaction:

  He sat—or lay, actually—next to me on the sofa and for the first time spoke bitterly of the ‘inspired calumnies’ he had heard. ‘They do not hit me, but after this election I am beginning to doubt the future of a people who allows its best friends to be so vilified … After my death it will surely conquer. Because I believe in the divine governance of the world. Perhaps you are laughing now, dear friend. I cannot see you. No matter. What I say sounds old-fashioned but I have fared very well by this belief. It alone has allowed me to hold out.’210

  In the camp of the defeated Liberals, bitterness was also great. On 25 February Ludwig Bamberger wrote to Franz Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, the Bavarian left liberal, and expressed his dismay:

  Although it was accomplished by crude cunning and coercion, I say to myself: the new representation is a true expression of the German popular will. Junkerdom and the Catholic church both know very clearly what they want, while the Bürgertum are childishly innocent, politically naïve, and in need of neither justice nor freedom. Junkerdom and Catholic church will join hands, and the burghers will get what they deserve, with the National Liberals contributing the political music. Il faut que les destines s’accomplissent. The crown prince is now relieved of all embarrassment. He will do what Bismarck wants.211