Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  On 15 April 1890 the Prince received Dr Emil Hartmeyer (1820–1902), the proprietor of the National Liberal daily, the Hamburger Nachrichten. Hartmeyer, who inherited this substantial regional newspaper from his father in 1855 and ran it as owner-editor for almost fifty years, invited Bismarck to use the services of the paper and its chief political correspondent Hermann Hofmann (1850–1915) as his own personal newspaper, and Bismarck accepted.90 The paper launched on that very day a sharp attack on the new Chancellor’s first Reichstag speech. Bismarck had no intention of going quietly into retirement. He lusted for revenge.

  Hatred and revenge had always moved him strongly and, now in impotent retirement, no positive activity nor satisfaction could distract him from the absolutely ruthless settlement of grievances—against the Kaiser, his successors as Chancellor, and against all those ministers who had not followed him into exile. Those on the list of enemies who had already died, like Guido von Usedom, would have their reputations blackened in every way possible when he came to write his memoirs. Those still alive and in office could be compromised and destroyed by leaks to the press. Heinrich von Boetticher, his subordinate and deputy, had stayed in office after Bismarck left, an offence for which the minister could not be forgiven. In March 1891 Bismarck leaked the story through his tame press that he had arranged a loan of 100,000 marks from the Guelph fund so that Boetticher could pay off the debt of his father-in-law. A few days later Philipp Eulenburg wrote to Boetticher a kind of condolence letter in which he expressed his horror and amazement:

  I had not remotely considered it possible that somebody would be capable of playing such a trick. If I take the personal grudge out of the picture, the entire affair must be seen as an unpatriotic act, which makes the line between personal wickedness and high treason very hard to draw.91

  Bismarck had no hesitation in crossing that line and wickedness is not a bad word for his act. He devoted six pages in his memoirs, an entire chapter, to the ingratitude and treachery of Karl Heinrich von Boetticher,92 and not a word about his leak of the compromising loan.

  The new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi (1831–99), found himself in a delicate situation. He had no political background but, as a soldier and as Imperial State Secretary of the Navy, after Bismarck had fired his enemy Stosch, Caprivi enjoyed a reputation as an upright, competent man, a conservative Christian but with a social conscience. The Times of 21 March 1890 gave its readers a picture of the man. He was unmarried, did not smoke, and had no independent income. His physical presence commanded attention:

  A typical Teuton of the hugest, most impressive type. He might very well pass for a brother or even a double of Prince Bismarck himself … In point of stature and breadth of shoulders, General von Caprivi even has the advantage of the man he is going to succeed … He is a good enough speaker but a brief one, and when at the head of the admiralty, he never failed from his place on the Federal Council bench in the Reichstag to put his case clearly and well.93

  Caprivi determined to adopt, as Heinrich Otto Meissner writes, ‘a Versöhnungspolitik [a politics of reconciliation] which would take the good from where it came … even hoped to win Social Democracy for the state.’94 The Reichstag which Bismarck had bequeathed to him had a negative majority. Caprivi had to govern with shifting majorities assembled for each bill, ‘which was no peculiarity of Caprivi’s system but of non-parliamentary constitutionalism in general’. The difficulty lay in appearances. ‘Without the characteristics of a demonic genius … it looked like wavering.’95 Windthorst had decided to support Caprivi’s army bill and did so. On 27 June 1890 ‘the military bill passed with 211 against 128. The majority contained the votes of the entire Cartel Parties, the overwhelming majority of the Centre and the Polish Party. To the minority belong the Progressives, the People’s Party, the Social Democrats, a few Guelphs and 21 South German Centre deputies.’96 Windthorst explained why he had opted to support Caprivi to one of his aides on 23 June 1890, who took down the remarkable argument verbatim:

  If the bill had been rejected, then a serious constitutional conflict stood in prospect and universal suffrage would have been extremely endangered. One may think what one wants of universal suffrage—I would never have introduced it—but to do away with it now would mean to make way for revolution and to weaken essentially the power of the Catholics. The latter lies in the masses. Catholics are positively the poorer [of the two confessions]; the ruling classes in the state, in municipal government, and, on account of their greater wealth, in social life as well are Protestant. The position of the new Chancellor Caprivi would have been violently shaken, if not destroyed, through the rejection of the military bill. These political considerations alone forced its adoption.97

  Windthorst, who always understood Bismarck’s tactics, showed again his acuteness. Bismarck had intended to create a crisis to abolish universal suffrage. If a crisis occurred now after his fall, he might be recalled. Windthorst and the Centre Party had to support Caprivi for fear of somebody worse and, above all, to keep Bismarck safely in retirement.

  In Friedrichsruh, the former Chancellor received visitors and played politics through his tame press. He also let it be known that he had begun working on his memoirs with the aid of his old amanuensis, Lothar Bucher. In March 1891, Baroness Spitzemberg visited and asked Bismarck if there were a chance of a reconciliation with the Kaiser and Bismarck made clear that there was not:

  No, that’s all over and done with. Imagine what it would be like if I lived in Berlin. How could I present myself to all those who have shamelessly dropped me as soon as they saw I no longer counted? Given the miserable way people behave would I not harm my friends? Everyone to whom I spoke, anybody who came to my house would be accused of ‘plotting with Bismarck!’ The Kaiser sent me packing like a lackey. I have all my life felt myself to be a nobleman, whom one cannot unpunished simply insult. From the Kaiser I can demand no satisfaction, so I just stay away.98

  When she asked him the next day why the Kaiser dismissed him, she got an unexpected answer from the Chancellor:

  I certainly can. A word from Versen, the chief flatterer,99 expresses it. He told him that if Frederick the Great had had or inherited such a chancellor, he would never have been ‘the Great’, and he wants to be ‘the Great’. May God give him the talent for it. I am the thick shadow there that stands between him and the sunshine of fame. He cannot allow as his grandfather did that some glamour of rule fall onto his ministers. It is inconceivable that he and I should work together. Even seeing each other is painful. I am a standing rebuke.

  Gradually Bismarck’s contemporaries began to die. On 15 March 1891 Windthorst died, on 24 April Moltke. In June 1891 Hans von Kleist visited Bismarck in Friedrichsruh. He had been moved to do so by ‘the public accusation that his old friends did not come to visit him. He was very friendly and dear. I caught not a trace of bitterness. That he gave up saying grace at table years ago, made me sad.’100

  During 1891 Herbert went to Fiume to stay with the family of his old friend from the diplomatic corps, Count Ludwig von Plessen, who had married the eldest daughter of Count Georg Hoyos and Alice Whitehead, daughter of the English inventor of the Whitehead torpedo. Count Georg had gone into his father-in-law’s business and ran the Silurifico Whitehead in Fiume. There he met another daughter, Marguerite Hoyos, a beautiful 22-year-old, and they got engaged. The marriage was planned for Wednesday, 21 June in the Protestant church in the Dorothea Gasse in Vienna’s fashionable First District. A marriage between the Bismarcks and one of the great Magyar noble houses would have been a social event in any case but in view of the status of the groom’s father, it became a political crisis for the Kaiser and Chancellor Caprivi. They assumed—wrongly—that Bismarck had arranged the occasion to make his re-entry onto the diplomatic stage in Vienna and the Kaiser reacted with his usual intemperance. Bismarck had, of course, notified the officials at the Hofburg that he would be in Vienna during the week of 15 to 22 June and would wish to pay his respects to the
Emperor Franz Joseph, whom he had known for four decades. On 9 June the Kaiser ordered Caprivi to notify the German embassies everywhere to take no notice of the former Chancellor’s presence and to Franz Joseph he wrote on 14 June to ask the Emperor his ‘true friend’ not to receive ‘this disobedient subject until he comes to me to say peccavi’.101

  The Austrian Emperor had no choice but to close his door to Bismarck and to order the official establishment in Vienna to ignore the most glamorous social event of the summer to which some 600 guests had been invited. As the New York Times wrote, ‘the Austrian officials were conspicuous by their absence. The Austro-Hungarian aristocracy were represented by Hungarian magnates attired in their gorgeous national costumes … The ex-Chancellor was attired in the uniform of the German Garde du Corps and wore a helmet surmounted with a silver eagle.’102 The event in spite of the Kaiser’s petty vindictiveness became a huge triumph for Bismarck. He was received by cheering crowds at every point on the journey to Vienna and in the city itself. He spent a week as a fantastic celebrity, loudly welcomed everywhere in Vienna and in cities in Germany which had officially been forbidden to receive him.

  Every kind of German patriotic body made a pilgrimage to the shrine at Friedrichsruh. The real Bismarck, the real history, no longer mattered. Bismarck became a public idol even in places like Munich where he had been hated. He had come to symbolize German greatness and pictures of the Iron Chancellor in his uniform and helmet hung in school rooms and parlours. His image had become and remained especially after the First World War a potent symbol of German greatness and articles and books appeared, as Robert Gerwarth shows in The Bismarck Myth103 with titles like ‘the Bismarck Legend’, ‘Bismarck’s Shadows’. His uniform and his aggressive facial expression in these souvenirs conveyed the image of blood and iron and contributed to the cult of German militarism and its deep-seated roots in German culture.

  Reality, as always, looked very different. On 18 March 1893 Baroness Spitzemberg visited Friedrichsruh:

  I found them entirely alone, the old couple, both now entirely white, she pathetically asthmatic. First they kept us company after lunch, and then we chatted and asked about each others’ friends and family. The death of Countess von Arnim before her decrepit husband, led Bismarck to remark, ‘I often think that our Creator and Lord does not do everything himself but lets the direction of certain areas pass to his ministers and civil servants, who then do dumb things. You see how imperfect we are and the Saviour is supposed to come to us. I cannot believe that. A police chief arrests a woman instead of a man. Those things happen.’104

  Relations between the Kaiser and Bismarck began to thaw in 1894. On 21 January Herbert von Bismarck was invited for the first time for years to the annual Ordensfest (the Festival of the Royal Orders), to which he was entitled as former Reichstag deputy and the holder of the Hohenzollern Hausorden (Family Order) with star and chain but Baroness Spitzemberg noted in her diary that the Kaiser ‘cut him’ even after Eulenburg had placed Herbert in the front of him. ‘Count Cramer told me that the fat deputy Alexander Meyer said that the Kaiser had placed him ostentatiously in such a way that he could intentionally cut Herbert.’105 Prince Hohenlohe, who had almost every order imaginable was also there and reflected on it: ‘Hence great indignation among the Bismarckians. They declared that the Emperor had notified Herbert Bismarck that he would speak with him. This, however, cannot be true. For when the Emperor sends anyone a message like that, he does not cut him in so marked a manner.’106

  A visit by the Chancellor to Berlin to see the Kaiser happened very shortly after the insult to Herbert. On 26 January 1894 Bismarck in his general’s uniform took the train to Berlin. Huge crowds waited at every station between Friedrichsruh and along the Hamburg line to Berlin and at the Lehrter Bahnof when the train arrived in Berlin. Prince Heinrich, the Kaiser’s younger brother, received him and escorted him to the palace where the Kaiser received him in a short private audience of which no record of any kind seems to have survived.107 Baroness Spitzemberg reported that the lunch party was very intimate and friendly: those present were the Kaiser and Kaiserin, Count Klinckstroem, twin brother of the commanding officer of the Halberstadt Cuirassiers of which Bismarck had been named Honorary Colonel, Prince Heinrich, the King of Saxony, Herbert, and Bill. ‘Everything went very cheerfully.’108 Hohenlohe noted that ‘the very numerous crowd that had gathered round greeted the carriage but there was no sign of any great enthusiasm … It is certain that this reconciliation has earned the Emperor great popularity through the whole of Germany. In the afternoon I left my card at the Bismarck house.’109 On 19 February 1894 William II returned the visit. Official relations had been restored between William II and Bismarck but there was never to be cordiality between them.

  During 1894 another structure designed by Bismarck for his own purposes came unstuck and led to the dismissal of Caprivi. After Caprivi’s failure to get a school bill through both the Reichstag and the Landtag in 1892, the Kaiser decided with Caprivi’s agreement to divide the Reich Chancellor’s post from that of the Prussian Minister-Presidency, and appointed Botho Eulenburg (1831–1912), nephew of the former Interior Minister under Bismarck and a hard-line Bismarck protégé.110 This was exactly what Bismarck had tried in 1872. It had not worked twenty years before and could not work in the 1890s either, indeed, could work even less well. Caprivi and Eulenburg had diametrically opposite views. Worse still, the Prussian Constitution of 1850 with its House of Lords and three-class voting system assured the owners of the Junker estates a permanent veto on change in the federal state which contained three-fifths of the population and most of the heavy industry. Its electoral districts, in addition, took no account of the growth of cities, working-class districts, and population trends. Even in the late 1890s, rural districts still voted for their lords as they had done fifty years earlier. During 1894 the Kaiser demanded that his two chief executives pass legislation against subversive and revolutionary activities, the so-called Umsturz-Vorlage, the overthrow bill. Caprivi faced a Reichstag elected in 1893 which had shifted rightwards but not far enough. The Cartel Parties had gained 18 seats but still only had 153 seats, short of 199, the minimum for a majority, but the opposition of Centre Left Liberals and SPD only had 188, also short of a majority. The logic of the system demanded that Caprivi introduce a mild bill against subversion while Botho Eulenburg demanded a harsh one in the hope that the Reichstag could be forced either to accept it or to face the Staatsstreich, or coup d’état, that Bismarck had also wanted: abolition of universal suffrage. On 26 October 1894 both Eulenburg and Caprivi submitted their resignations.

  In December 1894 Caprivi summed up the problem that the successor of Bismarck faced. Bismarck had done great damage and reduced the civil service ‘to servility … In my opinion, the successor—even if his capabilities had been greater—had to strive to give the Nation back its self-esteem; one must get along, indeed, with average—or, if you will, normal people.’111 This deep truth shows how much Germany lost when the unsteady Kaiser got bored with the sober, competent, and honourable soldier and dismissed him. Bismarck had left a system which only he—a very abnormal person—could govern and then only if he had as superior a normal Kaiser. Neither condition obtained, and the system slithered into the sycophancy, intrigue, and bluster that made the Kaiser’s Germany a danger to its neighbours.

  The Kaiser decided to appoint Chlodwig Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Prince of Ratibor and Corvey (1819–1901) as the new Reich Chancellor and summoned him to Potsdam by a telegram. He arrived on 27 October and after a day of long negotiations accepted the Emperor’s request to become Imperial Chancellor and, once again, Prussian Minister-President. Chlodwig Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst belonged to one of the grandest and richest of German dynasties. He was born on 31 March 1819 and was thus only four years younger than Bismarck, a Catholic but not an ultramontane, a Prince but an experienced politician, a Bavarian but one who had supported unification as Bavarian
Prime Minister in the late 1860s, and a friend of the Hohenzollern family. Bismarck knew him well, got on with him, and had appointed him Viceroy in Alsace-Lorraine. The Kaiser called him ‘Uncle Chlodwig’.112 Except for his age and his emollient temperament he had the perfect pedigree to fill the job. In January, 1895, Freiherr von Roggenbach wrote to Stosch that he was following Hohenlohe’s moves

  with melancholy fellow feeling … He is cunning and smooth but he has the Privy Councillor [Holstein—JS] against him … How shall he, Bavarian and Catholic, make people fear him? He would have to have a monarch stand behind him, who knows what he wants and supports him vigorously. As it is his chancellor post is a slow death.113

  On 27 November 1894 Johanna, Princess Bismarck died at Varzin. Baroness Spitzemberg reported that Bismarck’s first reaction to Johanna’s death was ‘were I still in office, I would work without rest, that would be the best way to help me get over this, but now …’114 Another, unexpected change occurred with the death of Johanna von Bismarck. Hildegard Spitzemberg lost her entrée to the Bismarck household.

  Since the death of the Princess, I lack the personality through whom I can make my wishes and rights count. Marie is entirely alienated, the sons, even when the Bismarcks were still here, stood apart from me. If I were a man, I could settle somewhere in Friedrichsruh and enjoy everything that happens from A to Z.115

  This change casts an interesting light on the relationship which Baroness Spitzemberg had cultivated for nearly forty years. Bismarck could have summoned her at any time, which in view of his emotional moments with her might have been expected, but he did not. Was it really Johanna who used Hildegard Spitzemberg to provide attractive and intelligent female company which she knew she could not provide? ‘Higachen’ served as a safe flirt and an intelligent listener, a Marie Thadden or Katarina Orlov with whom Bismarck never fell in love and with whom Johanna actually felt comfortable.