Bismarck: A Life
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Bismarck had another option—to entice the Centre to give him both bills in exchange for the final abolition of the remaining restrictions on the Catholic Church. On 10 March Windthorst called on Bleichröder, who urged him to meet Bismarck privately—whether he acted on his own or on Bismarck’s request is not known. On 12 March 1890 Ludwig Windthorst presented his card at the Bismarcks and was immediately received. Margaret Lavinia Anderson provides a vivid account of that meeting:
Bismarck welcomed his old opponent warmly, seating him on the sofa and plumping up cushions to support his back. Then he sat down beside him, leaned his head back on the sofa rail, and outlined the general political situation. He needed support and he asked Windthorst his price. It was Windthorst’s great moment. ‘The repeal of the Expatriation Law’, he began. ‘Done!’ Bismarck interjected. Revision of the Anzeigepflicht in accordance with the formula of the Prussian Bishops’ Conference, Windthorst continued; free activity of missions, the establishment of the status quo ante in Catholic matters, including the readmission of the Jesuits. To the last demand, Bismarck replied equivocally, but concluded, ‘It should be feasible. Not of course at once, but step by step …’ In this un-dramatic manner Bismarck agreed to concessions for which Windthorst had been fighting for eighteen years … In their unexpected need for each other, the barriers of rank, manners and long enmity dissolved and the old men treated each other as the intimates that they in some ways were. Windthorst cautioned Bismarck, ‘If anyone says to you, turn in your resignation, that in a fortnight they will be calling you back—don’t believe him. I went through that sort of thing twice in Hanover. Don’t believe a word; if you go, you won’t come back. Stay in office.’ Bismarck was not offended at this familiarity. ‘That’s true,’ he mused, ‘you have experience on your side. I must say you have spoken frankly with me.’ As he left, Windthorst was poignantly aware of how slim the chance that the concessions he had obtained would ever see the light of day. When he met Porsch that evening he look surprised and dazed. ‘I am coming from the political deathbed of a great man,’ he confided.69
The next day, 13 March 1890, Count Otto von Helldorf-Bedra (1833–1908), the leader of the Conservatives in the Reichstag, called an extraordinary meeting of the Fraction and bound them to accept no concessions on the Septennat and none on religious and educational questions. This decision meant that no deal with the Centre in spite of its 106 seats would have a majority in the Reichstag. Bismarck’s approach to Windthorst would compromise him without assuring his survival.
On the 14th Bismarck sent word to the Kaiser to beg an audience, which the Kaiser ignored. Bismarck gives a vivid account of the scene which followed in his memoirs. At 9 a.m. on the morning of the 15th the Kaiser sent word that he would arrive in thirty minutes. Bismarck had to be awakened, dressed hurriedly, and awaited the Kaiser without having time to breakfast. Bismarck began the report by announcing that he had seen Ludwig Windthorst, to which the Kaiser replied, ‘and you did not show him the door’. Bismarck declared that all parliamentary colleagues, provided they were well mannered, had always been received. The Kaiser then confronted Bismarck with the accusation, ‘you negotiate with Catholics and Jews behind my back.’ Bismarck reacted furiously that soon he would have to submit his menus.70 The Kaiser described the scene to Phili Eulenburg very vividly:
I sat at the table, my sabre between my knees, smoking a cigar. The Chancellor stood before me and his growing anger made me calmer. Suddenly he picked up a huge folder and hurled it down on the table in front of me with a big bang. I was afraid he was going to throw an inkwell at my head. Well, I took hold of my sabre! I could not believe it.71
The discussion had gone badly wrong from the beginning. Next the Kaiser demanded that the cabinet order of 1852 be rescinded to allow him to contact ministers directly since the Chancellor was always in Friedrichsruh. This further infuriated Bismarck. The Kaiser then said that he would amend the military bill to make sure that it found a majority in the Reichstag. The Kaiser thus removed the only conflict which might have assured Bismarck’s survival.
That afternoon the Chief of the Military Cabinet General Wilhelm von Hahnke (1833–1912), the Adjutant-General Adolf von Wittich, and the Chief of the General Staff Waldersee had an audience with the Kaiser, who told them what had happened. The Kaiser believed that ‘there is collusion between the Jesuits and rich Jews’. Waldersee argued, according to his diary, that Bismarck could not resign for fear of what his successors would find and ‘unfortunately also because he was too closely allied with the Jews and could not escape from them’. He then gave the Kaiser ‘a frank account of my views on the Chancellor without sparing him anything. Hahnke and Wittich were astonished, but the Kaiser not at all.’ The only disagreement between the Kaiser and Waldersee was over what to do next. Waldersee urged the Kaiser to dismiss Bismarck; Wilhelm II wanted to provoke Bismarck to resign.72
The next day von Hahnke arrived at the Reich Chancellery with the Kaiser’s demand that the 1852 order be rescinded and Bismarck refused. On 17 March August Eulenburg reported to Phili that no reply had been received to the Kaiser’s demand so that Hahnke would go again in the morning with a summons to the Chancellor to order him to come to the palace that afternoon with his resignation in his hand.73
Meanwhile at the palace, the Kaiser waited for Bismarck’s reply. His friend Phili Eulenburg spent the tense hours with him in his study and by the evening, when ‘Uncle Ernst’, the Duke of Coburg, arrived for dinner, nothing from Bismarck had been received. The Kaiser said, ‘now we have had enough; lets make music’. After dinner, Phili sat at the piano and played and sang his various ballads while the Kaiser sat next to him on the piano bench and turned the pages. The adjutant on duty slipped into the salon and the Kaiser went out for a second. When he returned and settled down next to Eulenburg, he whispered ‘the farewell is here’.74 Eulenburg may have got the date wrong or the Kaiser may have read more into the adjutant’s message then was actually there, for, according to other sources, nothing seemed to have arrived at the palace on 17 March.
That evening the entire cabinet assembled at Boetticher’s house and voted to appoint him as their spokesman. He was to beg an audience of his Majesty, as Lucius wrote in his diary,
in order to express our regret at the resignation of the Prince and to submit collectively our resignations in order to offer his Majesty in this respect complete freedom. The meeting became known that very evening through the Kölner Zeitung. All the papers according to their position published a political death notice and approved without exception the resignation of the Prince as right. With respect to the succession nothing positive has emerged. All the commanding generals have assembled.75
This unanimity from left to right in the press that Bismarck should go gives an indication of how much his political status had eroded and how little he understood that.
On 18 March Hermann von Lucanus (1831–1908), the Kaiser’s Civil Cabinet Chief, arrived at the Wilhelmstrasse to ask why the Prince had not replied to the Emperor’s demand. Lucanus, a senior civil servant, whom Bismarck had placed in the delicate office of Civil Cabinet Chief, must have found the assignment uncomfortable.76 Bismarck answered that the Kaiser had power to dismiss him at any time and needed no letter of resignation, nor could Bismarck see any need to submit one. He intended to write an explanation of his position which could be published and sat down to do so. While he composed this statement, General Leo von Caprivi had arrived to take over the Chancellorship and began work in the next room. Bismarck described his reaction in the Chapter ‘My Dismissal’ in Book Three of his memoirs: ‘My indifferent feelings gave way to a sense of injury … That was an expulsion without warning which at my age and after the length of my service I had every right to regard as rudeness and I am still today not free from the sense of injury at the mode of my expulsion.’77 He then wrote a long memorandum on the importance of the Cabinet Order of 8 September 1852, an order ‘which since then has been decisive for the
position of the Minister-President and alone gave him the authority which made it possible to exercise that level of responsibility for the collective policies of the cabinet.’ He then stated that he could not in good conscience carry out the Emperor’s demand that he rescind the Cabinet Order and still serve as His Majesty’s Minister-President and Reich Chancellor. He concluded the memorandum by writing:
With the devotion to the service of the royal house and to Your Majesty and the long years of habitual activity in a relationship, which I had considered lasting, it is very painful to withdraw from the accustomed connection to the All-Highest person and from my responsibility for overall policy in the Reich and Prussia. After conscientious consideration of All-Highest intentions, to the execution of which I must be ready, if I am to remain in service, I can only humbly beseech Your Majesty to relieve me of the office of Reich Chancellor, of that of Minister-President of Prussia and that of Prussian Minister of External Affairs with Your grace and with the obligatory pension.78
Thus ended the extraordinary public career of Otto von Bismarck, who from 22 September 1862 to 18 March 1890 had presided over the affairs of a state he had made great and glorious. In the convoluted language of the promemoria, the experienced courtier used the language of subordination and royal power which he had mastered and used for forty years but which had never impeded his ability to act as he saw fit. Now the humble posture that he had always necessarily adopted in his written communications with his royal master had become his real posture. The old servant, no matter how great and how brilliant, had become in reality what he had always played as on a stage: a servant who could be dismissed at will by his Sovereign. He had defended that royal prerogative because it allowed him to carry out his immense will; now the absolute prerogative of the Emperor became what it had always been, the prerogative of the sovereign. Having crushed his parliamentary opponents, flattened and abused his ministers, and refused to allow himself to be bound by any loyalty, Bismarck had no ally left when he needed it. It was not his cabinet nor his parliamentary majority. He had made sure that it remained the sovereign’s, and so it was that he fell because of a system that he preserved and bequeathed to the instable young Emperor. On 20 March the Kaiser replied in gracious tones and the resignation became official and public. The Kaiser wrote a twenty-page private letter to explain what had happened and why he had been forced to dismiss Bismarck. His conclusion uses a term which comes up again and again in contemporary assessments of Bismarck, ‘lust for power had taken a demonic hold on this noble, great man.’79 The Kaiser was not alone in that view.
Hildegard von Spitzemberg took time to reflect at some length in her diary how far and in what ways Bismarck had been the author of his own downfall. On 20 March, the day of Bismarck’s official resignation, she recognized that he had been to blame in the catastrophe for his long absences and his tendency to confuse public and personal business:
a series of necessary laws fell under the table because they did not suit his private interests as a landlord or simply because he had no time for them—As far as the family is concerned, nemesis breaks over them not unjustly for the brutality and heartlessness with which they trampled so many people, great and small into the dust, but the prospect will not be pleasant. My God, the vulgarity which will now show itself after the servility of earlier days.80
On 23 March 1890 the new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, the new Foreign Minister Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein (1842–1912), and Holstein met to decide whether or not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. Neither Caprivi nor Marschall had any experience of foreign affairs or diplomacy. Marschall had served in the Reichstag and from 1883 had been Baden’s ambassador to the Federal Council. He knew so little that he was jokingly described as the ‘minister étranger aux affaires’.81 Herbert Bismarck’s resignation had still not been accepted by the Kaiser and he continued to occupy the office of State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marschall’s new job. When he heard that Caprivi had been shown the secret Reinsurance Treaty, he became very angry with Holstein:
Thereupon the Count sent for me and said, maintaining his self-control with difficulty: ‘you have been guilty of something which in past circumstances I should have been obliged to punish most seriously. Under present conditions all I can say is that you have been in too big a hurry to regard me as a past number.’ I had no difficulty in justifying the professional propriety of my behaviour, and we parted, shaking hands for the last time.82
Holstein had not, of course, been honest with Herbert for some time but in this case he had behaved correctly by giving the text of the treaty to the new Reich Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Herbert behaved the way Hildegard Spitzemberg noted and confused personal and public.
On the night of 23 March 1890 the Prince and Princess Bismarck gave a farewell dinner for the entire State Ministry and the new Chancellor, General von Caprivi. Lucius, who attended, described it on the last page of his long record of life under Bismarck:
Caprivi gave his arm to the Princess, on whose left sat Boetticher. Maybach and I sat on either side of the Prince. The initial, stiff and depressed mood lifted gradually. The Prince and Princess had already during the afternoon taken leave of the Empress Frederick. The Princess expressed loudly and without reserve her view of the events of the recent days. Bismarck treated Caprivi with great warmth, wished him as he left everything good and offered his advice, if should need it.83
On 24 March the annual dinner of the Black Eagle Order, the highest Prussian decoration, took place. Everybody who counted and who had made a reputation in the Hohenzollern Kingdom regularly attended. Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who kept a splendid diary, recorded the event:
At half past one—dinner at which I sat between Stosch and Kameke. The former told me about his quarrel with Bismarck and was as chirpy as a wren that he could now speak openly and that the great man was now no longer to be feared. This comfortable feeling is universal here. Here again it is true that the meek inherit the earth.84
Hildegard Spitzemberg went back to see them a week after her previous visit and found the atmosphere already very unpleasant, as
a consequence of the sad and subjective view of people which for a long time determined the tone in this house and how much is now personal hatred and bitterness? … It is highly distressing to hear how dreadfully the violence and petty urge to rule had gained the upper hand in the Prince’s behaviour.85
On 29 March 1890 Hildegard Spitzemberg called at 77 Wilhelmstrasse as the Bismarck family were about to leave. She found movers and packers dismantling the house, and
empty, smoke-stained walls … Only when the Princess told us how yesterday the Prince had gone alone to the old Kaiser’s mausoleum to take leave of his old master, did we all burst into tears. ‘I took roses with me,’ the Prince explained, ‘and laid them on the coffin of the old Emperor. I stood there for a long time and called down to him a variety of things.’86
News of their departure had spread in Berlin and large crowds lined the route to the Lehrter Bahnhof. The public had expected that William II would appear to see Bismarck off but he did not. ‘A squadron of guards cuirassiers with band and standards had assembled on the platform. All the ministers, ambassadors, generals were present … There was a deafening “hurrah” and “auf Wiedersehen”. As the train began to move, the public joined in singing the “Wacht am Rhein”. Thus the last act has been played out and an event of incalculable scope has taken place.’87 With these words, Robert Lucius von Ballhausen ended his long diary. Ludwig Bamberger noted the event on the same day: ‘departure today. The Bismarck legend begins. If the National Liberals were not slaves, they could use it to become great again. He is gone as the Great Devil who towers over his nation.’88
Nobody who knew Bismarck or Johanna could imagine a serene retirement and a quiet old age. Within days he had set up a ‘shadow government’, the shrine to his genius and the headquarters of the anti-Kaiser William II fronde. Two weeks was
all that Bismarck needed to mobilize his own press corps. He no longer had the ‘Reptile Fund’ at his disposal to pay for planted articles, but he had no need to pay in cash. He paid in secrets revealed, in interviews, and in his incomparable authority, the authority of ‘the Great Devil who towers over his nation’, as Bamberger called him. War between Friedrichsruh and the new government would soon break out. To the surprise of the family, he no longer interested himself in the management of his now considerable landed property. It worried Herbert that his father looked ‘uninterested or bored or actually never listened’ when farm management needed decisions. He interested himself only in reading newspapers and in what Herbert called ‘playing pseudo-politics’.89 Herbert moved to Schönhausen, where he actually enjoyed the life of the country squire, and never returned to Berlin politics.