Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Bismarck carried on life on his own. He hosted an official visit by the new Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President who travelled to Friedrichsruh to pay a condolence call on 13 January 1895. Prince Hohenlohe took his son Prince Alexander (1862–1924) with him, who proved to be as gifted a diarist as his father. It is his account which I cite:

  Bismarck, large, massive, broad shouldered with a small head for his size but finely shaped, under bushy eyebrows his eyes—something that one often sees among heavy drinkers—teary but remarkably beautiful from which sudden bolts of lightning would flash. He covered his massive body with a one-piece black, long and remarkably old-fashioned tunic, more appropriate for a priest than a statesman. He wrapped a white neck cloth around his neck of the kind people used to wear in the 1830s or 1840s … While Bismarck spoke, his soft gentle voice struck me and those unforgettable eyes … On the way home I asked my father about that remarkable, gentle voice. He said to me with a laugh, ‘In those gentle tones he read the death sentence for many careers and twisted the neck of many a diplomat who had provoked his hate.’116

  On 26 March 1895 the Kaiser himself visited Friedrichsruh to pay respects to Bismarck on his 80th birthday. The Kaiser arrived ‘on horseback with spiked helmet and glistening breastplate and led a small army of infantry, artillery, hussar cavalry and naturally the Halberstadt cuirassiers’.117

  After the festivities Bismarck settled into old age and loneliness. As he wrote to Bill on 30 July 1895:

  I continue to vegetate in peace here, put my clothes on and take them off and would have pleasure in driving through the good harvest in Schönhausen, if I did not come back in the evening punished with more acute Gesichtsreissen in spite of the good weather. According to medical opinion my pains come from too little, according to my opinion, from too much outdoor exposure. A similar dilemma confronted Merk with his palace dog (Hofhund); he wanted to beat him because he barked too much. I offered him the thought that the dog might take the view that he had been punished for not barking enough. My incapacity to judge the cause of my facial pains is as great as the dog’s about the reason for the beating.118

  The old Chancellor had one more sensation to spring on his successors. On 24 October 1896 the Hamburger Nachrichten published the terms of the Reinsurance Treaty and reported that it was

  Count Caprivi who rejected the continuation of this mutual assurance, where Russia was prepared to continue it. … So came Kronstadt with the Marseillaise and the first drawing together of the absolutist Tsardom and the French Republic, brought about, in our opinion, exclusively by the mistakes of the Caprivi policy.119

  A curt official note a few days later denounced this revelation as a ‘violation of the most confidential secrets of state which constituted a blow to the serious interests of the Empire’.120

  The revelation of the treaty naturally caused a huge sensation. On 27 October Eulenburg wrote a secret memorandum for Bernhard Bülow in which he argued that the revelation ‘certainly qualifies as betrayal of a state secret for which not less than two years in prison is the penalty. It has crashed like a bomb in the Foreign Ministry.’ Nobody, including the Chancellor, could imagine the motive that might have prompted it. Eulenburg believed that it had no purpose other than ‘to stir up dissatisfaction—in general increase the disquiet’.121

  A few days later, Eulenburg wrote a long letter to Kaiser William II and made another attempt to explain the revelation. He rejected Holstein’s theory that Bismarck wanted to destroy the Austro-German-Italian Triple Alliance of 1882 and the Chancellor’s explanation that Bismarck simply wanted to stir up trouble: ‘I believe that the evil old man found the articles very irritating that appear from time to time that say (and rightly!) he had caused our bad relations with Russia. With him everything is explained personally.’ He went on to describe how Alfred Marschall von Bieberstein, the Foreign Minister, had arranged a lunch to discuss the government’s response and

  sat there with a long, pear-shaped face. First as the fruit was served, he cheered up. His own home-grown pears awakened him from his state prosecutorial reflections about the two year jail sentence that awaited the wicked old man in Sachsenhausen according to § so and so. And still, if the old Prince had gone to jail, he would have offered him a slice of his ‘Beurée Marschall’ or the ‘Marschall long-lasting pear’. C’est plus fort que lui. These pears are his joy, his sunshine. Everybody has his ‘pear’, so why should not he?122

  The debate in the Reichstag and in the public concentrated on the treaty’s terms, but which treaty? All the Three Emperor’s League treaties were secret and the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 most secret of all so commentators thought that Bismarck had revealed the terms of the 1884 agreement which—they reasonably assumed—had been set for six years and thus needed renewal when Caprivi came into office. Herbert complained to Kuno Rantzau, who was living with his father-in-law in Friedrichsruh on 16 November about the confusion. On 17 November Rantzau replied that apparently even Bismarck had begun to get the treaties muddled, perhaps, the first sign of failing powers:

  He continues to think in spite of everything that the treaty of 1884 which was revealed had a six-year term. I have up to now been unable to convince him. Maybe you can get him to understand when you come.123

  The shock abroad was no less great. Kaiser Franz Joseph in Vienna was ‘beside himself about the evil old man in Friedrichsruh’, and even Lord Rosebery, the former British Prime Minister, wrote a personal letter to Herbert on 25 November 1896 to ask for an explanation:

  I wish, if it seems good to you, you would throw some light on the recent ‘revelations’ and their cause. But if you prefer to say nothing. I will understand. I don’t think I have ever asked you a question of this kind on paper in my life before.124

  Manfred Hank in his remarkable study of these last years could not find an answer and has no reliable explanation.125 I suspect that a combination of Bismarck’s habitual ‘frankness’, his irresistible urge to show the world that he did everything better than his successors, and sheer malice combined to create the conditions for the revelation. He had always been beyond and above the laws that bound mortals. The only sign of a difference is that he muddled the 1884 and 1887 treaties; Bismarck in full command of his powers would never have done that.

  In other respects, during 1896, Bismarck’s health began to decline and the disintegration of his household without the firm grip of Johanna did not help. Schweninger diagnosed gangrene of the foot, which he treated but Bismarck refused to accept the treatment. He was supposed to stand up and walk but no longer did so. During 1897 he was often reduced to a wheelchair and by 1898 he rarely went out to his woods and fields. In July 1898 he could only get about in a wheelchair and was in such pain and often feverish he had difficulty breathing. On 28 July Schweninger got him onto his feet and he sat at the table, talking and drinking champagne. Afterwards he smoked three pipefuls and read the newspapers, the old Bismarck once more but for the last time.

  The Kaiser and the entourage were aboard the SMS Hohenzollern on the annual North Sea cruise on 29 July 1898 and were heading for Bergen in Norway, when, as Eulenburg recorded in his diary,

  Today news arrived that Schweninger had left Friedrichsruh … That Schweninger would make every effort to arouse the impression in Germany that the Kaiser was indifferent to this deeply moving event is certainly to be expected and his departure from Friedrichsruh is an adroit chess move which he placed through the Tägliche Rundschau. It is probably safe to assume that he only left because the Prince is now beyond hope.126

  The fact that Bismarck had improved on 28 July would not have been known to the Kaiser or the court on board but they immediately assumed that Schweninger’s move had a nefarious purpose—to undermine the Kaiser. Even the last forty-eight hours of Bismarck’s life were darkened by suspicion and recrimination.

  Over the next two days his condition deteriorated and he had trouble breathing. Just short of midnight on 30 July, he died. Herbert
was with him to the end. On 31 July Herbert wrote to his brother-in-law Ludwig von Plessen:

  yesterday morning his breathing grew worse and at about 10.30 he spoke to me and stretched out his hand to me, which I held until he went to sleep … Toward 11 it was all over for us. I have lost the best and truest father and most splendid and noblest spirit in the world.127

  Even after death the Bismarck’s family needed to revenge itself on its enemies and Moritz Busch had found a way to get at the Kaiser. On 31 July the Berliner Lokal- Anzeiger published an article by Moritz Busch which contained the complete text of Bismarck’s resignation letter. Eulenburg asked,

  Who had fired this unhappy reminiscence into the public, a provocation in view of the fact that the dead Prince still lay on his death bed? Without having asked Herbert, Rantzau and the family, Busch would never have reopened this feud.128

  The Kaiser had ordered the ‘Hohenzollern’ to return to Kiel as quickly as possible. On the journey home, William II planned a magnificent funeral in the Cathedral of Berlin and burial of ‘Germany’s greatest son … by the side of my ancestors’.129 But when the royal party reached Friedrichsruh, they learned that Bismarck’s final wishes had been set out: no postmortem, no death mask, no drawings, no photographs, and a burial place on the grounds. There were to be no flamboyant gestures from Kaiser William II and no ceremony in Berlin. He had chosen as his epitaph ‘A loyal German servant of William I.’130 A brief memorial ceremony on 2 August then took place. Hildegard Spitzemberg read about the simple ceremony at the house in the Sachsenwald and saw at once what it meant: ‘I can well understand it. Blood is blood and the Bismarcks are defiant, violent men, unrestrained by education and culture and not noble in temperament.’131 Phili Eulenburg recorded how painful the occasion was:

  Next to me stood Herbert, to whom I was the truest of friends, when he had to choose between Elizabeth Hatzfeldt and his father. There he stood, cold and still at war for his father … Never has the poison of politics been brought so crudely to my sight, as now in this house …132

  Conclusion

  Bismarck’s Legacy: Blood and Irony

  Blood and Iron

  ‘The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.’

  Otto von Bismarck, 30 September 1862

  Irony n.

  2. fig. A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things. (In F. ironie du sort.)

  Oxford English Dictionary

  Many contemporaries believed that Bismarck’s power—and his ability to hold on to it—had something inhuman to it. But what? Not even the devout Roman Catholic Windthorst could have believed that Bismarck was literally le diable, which he once called him but, as the greatest German parliamentarian of the nineteenth century and, perhaps, the shrewdest, Windthorst sensed, as others did, that there was an unearthly dimension to him, perhaps what Ernst Rentch and later Freud would call das Unheimliche (uncanny). When Odo Russell and Robert Morier called Bismarck the Zornesbock, the raging billy goat,1 did they choose the Bock, knowing that the devil used the goat as one of his many disguises?

  Yet Bismarck’s personality had such contradictions in it that it could be experienced as positive or negative—angelic or demonic—sometimes both at the same time. Hildegard von Spitzemberg, who saw him regularly over thirty years, could never get over the contrasts in her great friend. She admitted in her diary on 4 January 1888 that ‘the apparent contradictions in the powerful personality are of such an intense magic, that I am bewitched anew every time’.2 Both Stosch and Baroness Spitzemberg used words like ‘bewitched’ or ‘enchantment’ to describe the impact of his presence. Bismarck in conversation or in a formal speech seems to have had a special charm, not, as we have seen, charisma in the Weberian sense, but, nonetheless something irresistibly compelling. Disraeli wrote a diary entry about Bismarck’s conversation: ‘His views on all subjects are original, but there is no strain, no effort at paradox. He talks as Montaigne writes.’3 Ludwig Bamberger, who knew him well, described the terrifying and yet charming way he looked:

  Behind the curtain of his heavy moustache one can always only partly observe him. With his usual chattiness there appears something soft and always lightly smiling across his broad lips, but directly behind lies something powerfully tearing, definitely like a predatory beast. This charming, lightly smiling mouth can open suddenly and swallow the interlocutor. He has a bulging chin, an upside-down teacup of flesh, with the convex side turned outward. The eyes are mistrustful/friendly, lurking/bright, cold/flashing, determined not to reveal what goes on behind them unless he intends it.4

  There were times when Bismarck revealed what went on behind those eyes: once in October 1862 when he bragged to Kurt Schlözer how he had successfully deceived all the political actors in the conflict over the army,5 and the other when he explained his tactics in gaining dominance in student life: ‘I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.’6 Both Schlözer and Motley believed that they had heard the authentic Bismarck. Motley built it into a novel when he returned to Boston in the 1830s, long before his friend had become the great Bismarck of history. That cynical cunning startled even the sceptical Schlözer in October 1862. He began to see Bismarck as a kind of malign genius who, behind the various postures, concealed an ice-cold contempt for his fellow human beings and a methodical determination to control and rule them. His easy chat combined blunt truths, partial revelations, and outright deceptions. His extraordinary double ability to see how groups would react and the willingness to use violence to make them obey, the capacity to read group behaviour and the force to make them move to his will, gave him the chance to exercise what I have called his ‘sovereign self’.

  Another, very perceptive contemporary saw what lay behind the charm and fluency—an absence of principle. Clement Theodor Perthes warned Roon against Bismarck in early 1864, ‘the man in Prussia, who calculates so coldly, who prepares so cunningly, who is so careless of the means that he chooses …’7 ‘Cold’, ‘cunning’, and ‘careless about means’ add up to a kind of evil or what Queen Victoria quite openly called ‘wicked’.8

  Even old and close friends received rough treatment if they refused to bend to Bismarck’s will. When his childhood friend Moritz von Blanckenburg refused to accept his offer of a ministry, ‘he threatened me with a transfer to Stettin in the most ruthless way.’9 He drew a knife on Hans von Kleist on one occasion and warned him on another that he would have him arrested for not revealing the source of a leaked memorandum. He dismissed his old mentor, Ludwig von Gerlach, from the high court in 1874 without an apparent twinge of remorse. No sentiment withstood his unbridled urge to dominate. General Alfred Count von Waldersee summed up what many thought in a diary entry from March 1890. Bismarck, he wrote, ‘has a very bad character; he has not hesitated to disclaim his friends and those who have helped him most.’10

  His contemporaries used a variety of terms to describe Bismarck’s unusual role in transforming Prussia and Germany. With what historical figure might he be compared? He was the over-mighty courtier, or a Richelieu, or a major domus. However, none adequately caught the breadth and depth of his huge personality. Often his friends and enemies called him a dictator, an odd usage in a state with an absolute monarch. Disraeli wrote in 1878: ‘He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest of the Prussians and all the permanent foreign diplomacy, tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile.’11 As one of his friends, General von Schweinitz observed in 1886: ‘The dictatorship of Bismarck, which has had on the whole an educational and positive influence on the mass of the people, has degraded the higher levels of the official world. It leaves room in a strange way for a very impressive secondary tyranny.’12

  Schweinitz was wrong. Dictatorship alwa
ys degrades those who exercise it and those subject to it. When Bismarck left office, the servility of the German people had been cemented, an obedience from which they never recovered. The upper reaches of society had been debased as the general rightly noticed, and they too never recovered. Government by intrigue had brought Bismarck to power and intrigue around Kaiser William II brought him down. Like the traditional palace favourite, he rose by camarilla and fell by it. He was a dictator but one dependent on the will of the King.

  Among the seven deadly sins, Bismarck committed repeatedly and without limit the sin of wrath. He bubbled with rage. Nobody ever indulged himself so utterly in vehement or violent anger as Otto von Bismarck. He raged and hated until he nearly killed himself. He lost his temper at the slightest provocation. He wrote to his brother that he had got into such ‘a rage over those who keep knocking at my door and annoy me with questions and bills that I could bite the table’.13 The rest of his life he stewed and fumed and suffered the aftermath of these fits in sleeplessness and psychosomatic illnesses. The pretexts were often trivial. The Federal Council rejected the appointment of an obscure Hanoverian to head the postal service. The stenographers at the Reichstag took down a speech incorrectly and he saw in a harmless mistake a conspiracy against him. The absurd conflict over stamp duty on postal transfers caused one of his most famous rages. He flew into a rage when the President of the Reichstag rang the bell to call him to order. Alexander von Below-Hohendorf got it right when he called Bismarck ‘sick unto death’. In a letter of 7 December 1859 he wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that Bismarck had become deranged by his concentration on his enemies and ‘extreme thoughts and feelings’. The cure was simple and Christian: ‘love thine enemies!’ This was the best ‘door’ through which to release ‘the mounting pressures from the darkness of his sick body and the best medicine against the amazing visions and thoughts [Vorstellungen] that threaten to draw him to death’.14