That advice made sense. Bismarck’s sick soul needed a release and to his Junker friends that release could be found at any moment through penitence, grace, and the love of God. Prayer, as von Below urged on him, has as its object change; the need to accept responsibility for one’s sins, to acknowledge one’s weaknesses, as the Book of Common Prayer’s general confession of 1662 puts it: ‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.’
This surrender to divine will must have been hard for Bismarck. The liturgy repeatedly urges penitents not only to come humbly to God but to seek forgiveness from those we have hurt or offended. I cannot recall a letter in which Bismarck apologized for anything more serious than not writing or forgetting a family birthday. He certainly made no apology to his enemies and, when five cabinet ministers asked permission to go to Lasker’s funeral, he said ‘certainly not’—and this tells us a great deal—none of them went. It occurred to none of these high-placed gentlemen that Bismarck’s refusal to curb his vindictiveness even before the open coffin was an outrage. Why indeed did they need his permission? Why did they not simply go to pay their respects?
His wrath destroyed his eldest son, Herbert, who could not marry the woman he loved because Bismarck hated her family. They belonged to the clique of his ‘enemies’. The objects of his rage and hatred mattered more to him than his child. Rancour destroyed this precious bond—the love of father for his son—as it destroyed almost all his old friendships. It poisoned his mind and soul and it led him to seek revenge, never repentance.
His unbridled misogyny needs a further word. Bismarck turned his life into a physical and psychic hell because he so implacably despised the Queen/Empress Augusta and the Crown Princess Victoria. Again and again the ‘strong woman’ played the role of evil enchantress in his psyche. These all-powerful women dominated their weak husbands and threatened Bismarck from all sides. He sensed conspiracies everywhere. The women caused all his difficulties. He imagined their influence as malign and pervasive to a degree that can fairly be called paranoid. One need not be a Freudian to see how the hatred that Bismarck felt for his cold, intelligent, and unloving mother became an obsession as he exercised his genius and will in politics. Here Bismarck got caught in a convolution from which he could not extricate himself. He relied on William I’s weakness to be able govern. Yet that weakness arose in part from the strength of the Queen. Had William I not been pliant in dealing with Augusta, he would not have been pliant in dealing with Bismarck. This desperate struggle to control an emotional old man who actually held power that neither Bismarck nor Augusta could entirely control wore Bismarck’s nerves to shreds. He had to re-enact day after day, year after year, the agony of his childhood, the little boy at the point of an upside-down triangle and at the mercy of the struggle between the threatening woman and weak man. His rage, his sweats, his sleeplessness arose frequently from this impotence. The most powerful man in Europe, swollen with pride and bilious, had to bow to the old lady who happened to be the Queen. The humiliation must have been unbearable.
His confession to Hans von Kleist in 1851 that he could not control his sexual urges adds a further twist to the pain. The stubborn refusal of Johanna von Bismarck to make herself into a society lady for him meant that nowhere could he find consolation or a way to escape the Oedipal triangle which Prussian kingship forced him to re-enact every day. Indeed Johanna von Bismarck expressed her love for her husband by learning to hate as fiercely as he did. Hildegard Spitzemberg, Holstein, and many others noticed how bitter and vindictive Johanna was. Nobody in the Bismarck household saw that they did him harm by stirring his poisonous feelings.
The king would not always give in to Bismarck’s demands. He was a conscientious Mason and protected Lodge brothers. He cared about many of his ministers. He felt, as a decent man, real loyalty to his ‘servants’ and could not allow them to be brutally discarded by his all-powerful subject. The king’s kindness and consideration for others further enraged Bismarck. If the king wrote or spoke sharply to him, Bismarck collapsed into bed and was sometimes ill for weeks on end. Whatever William I meant by writing ‘How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you into taking the extreme step!’ he had reason to complain. William could not have shown Bismarck more love and attention. Yet in conversation with Disraeli, in June of 1878, Bismarck had the nerve to complain of the horrible conduct of his Sovereign.15 This monologue astonished Disraeli because Bismarck said these things in public at a state dinner. They were almost certainly imaginary. I have not seen one word to substantiate the charge. Augusta certainly hated Bismarck and with reason, but she was sane. She knew that she had to live with the demonic Chancellor and his hypnotic power over husband. She sought moments when reconciliation without loss of face on his side might be possible. When in March 1873 Odo and Lady Emily Russell enjoyed the ‘unique favour’ of a visit from the Emperor and Empress to the British embassy for a private dinner, protocol required Bismarck to sit on the left of Her Imperial Majesty for an hour or so and to make polite conversation. He could not do it and refused the invitation. The greatest political genius of the nineteenth century lacked the courage and self-control to behave like the ‘nobleman’ he claimed to be in the presence of his sovereign and his sovereign lady. All he had to do was chat for an hour. The Iron Chancellor, who caused three great wars, feared a little old lady with a Saxon accent.
Furious and commanding he could be but Bismarck always managed to evade responsibility when things went wrong. He had lied to his mother from early childhood and continued to lie all his life. He lied to Johanna in 1851 that he had done nothing to gain the appointment to Frankfurt, when the evidence shows that he had intrigued for more than a year to get it. He always lied when he might be blamed for something. As Waldersee observed, ‘lying has become a habit with him.’ His memoirs twist and suppress the truth. He lied to the King about his relationship with Eulenburg during the crisis about local government 1872. His reply to Eulenburg’s letter contains falsehoods that anyone could spot. His preoccupation with military uniforms could be called another kind of lie. He had been a draft dodger in 1839–40 and lied about that, aided by the editors of the Collected Works, who removed the compromising correspondence from the record.
Finally he was guilty of yet another of the deadly sins: gluttony. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the vice of excessive eating. (One of the seven deadly sins.) Also rarely an instance of this.’ Gluttony may not be the most obvious of the deadly sins but it nearly killed Bismarck. Had Schweninger not given him the maternal care he needed in 1883 and reduced his intake, he would certainly have died of the combination of wrath and gluttony. If pride kills the soul, rage and gluttony ravage the body. Eating as a substitute for whatever Bismarck lacked represents yet again his utter unwillingness to exercise self-control over his appetites or to submit to the charge of another, even his personal physician. He was the great Bismarck from the age of 17 to the day he died, subject to none of the limitations which ordinary mortals must accept.
And then there were the virtues. The contradictions in his character that Hildegard Spitzemberg described earlier in this chapter apply to other aspects of Bismarck’s personality. He had many virtues. He was courteous to visitors, irrespective of status. He had both charm and warmth which overwhelmed Mary Motley and Lucius von Ballhausen when they first met him. The modest way the Bismarcks lived struck everybody as remarkable, and his irresistible sense of humour could win over enemies. Bismarck enjoyed the love and affection of his family and friends. The King, General Leopold von Gerlach, Roon, Motley, Moritz von Blankenburg, and countless others loved him and continued to do so in spite of his neglect and brutality to them. Marie von Thadden certainly loved him and so did his devoted wife, his sister, and brother. Nobody c
an read Bismarck’s letters to his sister without seeing how much love he could show. His successes in his career rested as much on the faithfulness, love, and loyalty of friends and patrons as well as subordinates such as Tiedemann and Keudell.
He could not, on the other hand, forgive and forget. Bismarck’s hostility to Queen Augusta concerned her politics. She was a Saxon princess, liberal in a sort of Coburgian way, friendly with Catholics, sympathetic to the middle states, and very intelligent. She threatened Bismarck because, as he constantly complained, she had the breakfast table at her disposal. There is little evidence that Augusta’s coterie of liberal advisers accomplished a thing or had much if any influence over the Emperor. He had his own firm views on most issues and seems not to have had a close enough relation to his wife to take her views too seriously. The real threat came from the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. They represented another Germany. Had William I done the decent thing and died at a reasonable age, at least young enough to allow Frederick and Victoria to rule for a few years, the conflict between the Crown and Chancellor would have ended Bismarck’s career smartly and finally.
Bismarck saw politics as struggle. When he talked about ‘politics as the art of the possible’, he meant that in a limited sense. He never considered compromise a satisfactory outcome. He had to win and destroy the opponents or lose and be destroyed himself. Very early in his career, he had a clash in the Prussian Landtag in which he showed his preference for conflict. On 27 January 1863, in one of his first speeches, he told the deputies his view of constitutionalism. ‘Constitutional life is a series of compromises. If these are frustrated, conflicts arise. Conflicts are questions of power, and whoever has power to hand, can go his own way.’ Maximilian Count von Schwerin cried out in amazement, ‘power comes before morality’.16 The Count missed the point; the issue was not morality but compromise. Whoever has power in a normal political system may win a round but must then continue the struggle to reach consensus. That was not Bismarck’s way. He set out to ‘beat them all’ and did. In a political system where principle stood at the centre of political activity, he had none but the naked exercise of his own power and the preservation of royal absolutism on which that power rested. If politics according to Bismarck were the ‘art of the possible’, but without compromise, what sort of art or craft was it? And to what end?
In international relations, it meant absolutely no emotional commitment to any of the actors. Diplomacy should, he believed, deal with realities, calculations of probabilities, assessing the inevitable missteps and sudden lurches by the other actors, states, and their statesmen. The chessboard could be overseen and it suited Bismarck’s peculiar genius for politics to maintain in his head multiple possible moves by adversaries. Since the international system of the nineteenth century rested on five (or six, if one counts Italy) great powers, Bismarck could deploy his ‘combinations, as Morier called them, with some assurance. He had his goals in mind and achieved them. He was and remained to the end master of the finely tuned game of diplomacy. He enjoyed it. In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless. He could outsmart and outplay the smartest people in other states and, even better, no Queen could get in his way. On occasion when he was ill or wallowing in self-pity, he considered the surrender of certain burdens of office. He never once suggested that anybody else should be Foreign Minister. Indeed, his miscalculation in 1890 arose in part because he believed that young Kaiser William II would never sacrifice his Chancellor’s thirty years of success and expertise.
Domestic politics posed a very different challenge. There were endless details, messy and insoluble problems, lots of different actors with conflicting interests, issues that had unforeseeable consequences, and the constant buzz of irritating criticism from tedious people in parliaments—two, the Reichstag and the Landtag, within a mile of each other. He had to know everything and decide everything but he was always ill, away for months and constantly impatient. Even more taxing was the fact that he had no very strong principles on practical matters and shifted his position all the time on issues of local government, trade, commercial regulations, legal codes, and the machinery of the modern state. He chose to complicate his life by stirring up the Kulturkampf and in due course provoking conservatives, liberals, progressives as well as the Guelphs, Poles, and Alsatians who sat in the Reichstag.
The Gerlachs were not wrong that principles matter in politics. Neither reality nor power has unequivocal or objective meanings. Human beings have values, faiths of various kinds, and preferences. The Bismarckian assumption that a master player can ‘game’ the system worked only to a point at which irrational emotions, violence, confusion, incompetence, began to mix themselves up with his plans. What is the purpose of the art of politics if not to serve some cause, to improve the conditions under which people have to live, to make societies, freer, more just and more humane or, with the Gerlachs more Christian? Bismarck practised his wizardry to preserve a semi-absolute monarchy and, when it suited him, he would preserve the rights of a narrow, frugal, fiercely reactionary Junker class, who hated all progress, liberalism, Jews, socialists, Catholics, democrats, and bankers. He differed from them only in his ruthlessness.
Bismarck used the German people, the King, the Gerlachs, in order to gain power but, as the German philosopher Kant warned, ‘Act so that you use humanity, as much as in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.’17 Bismarck ignored this both in his grand schemes and in his treatment of colleagues and subordinates. Count Albert von Pourtalès, a very distinguished diplomat in the Prussian Foreign Service, wrote to Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg: ‘Bismarck uses and misuses his party comrades. To him they are … just post horses with whom he travels to the next stop … From him I am saddled and ready to meet the blackest ingratitude.’18
Bismarck bequeathed to his successors an unstable structure of rule. The constitution of Prussia had been thrown together in the muddle of the revolution of 1848–9. Bismarck preserved it with its grossly unbalanced representation system. It continued to give the small class of Junker landlords a permanent veto on progress. Since Prussia amounted to three-quarters of the population, territory, and industrial power, it served as a surrogate for Germany as whole. Prussia’s House of Lords, gerrymandered and patched with difficulty, gave Hans von Kleist and his friends a place to dig in. The lower house with its three-class voting system did the rest. The fact that Germany never had its own army or Foreign Ministry (Prussia retained both) meant that the country went into the war of 1914 run by exactly the same families whose names make up the order of battle in 1870 and with the same impossible structure of rule.
Neither he nor his successors found a way to protect the semi-absolute power of the monarch in the unstable double legislative structure which Bismarck had cobbled together. The entire period from 1866 to 1890 is one long institutional tinkering—separate the Minister-President’s office from that of Reich Chancellor (1872–3 and 1892–4) and then reunite them because separation had not worked. Fuse the Reich and Prussian ministries and then decide against it; Bismarck fell over one of these jerry-built structures, the act of 1852 which, he believed, prevented the King/Emperor from consulting ministers directly without the Minister-President’s permission. In the Reich, there were no ministers, only so-called ‘State Secretaries’ who assisted the Chancellor but in theory had no independent power. Under Bismarck’s much weaker successors, the greater figures among the State Secretaries gained freedom to enjoy direct access to the Kaiser. Admiral Tirpitz, the powerful Reich Minister of the Naval Administration from 1897 to 1916, as an officer had an ‘immediate’ position, that is, direct access to the Emperor, and he used it. Without Bismarck, only Kaiser William II could coordinate policy and he could not or would not try.
In one of his most brilliant and fateful ploys, Bismarck announced in 1863 that the new Germany would have universal manhood suffrage. He used the people to undermin
e and tame the German princes, whose power and intransigence he grossly overestimated. On the other hand he underestimated the power of the people because he failed to see how the people had changed by the middle of the nineteenth century. He saw that the people had put Napoleon III into power and assumed that the masses were monarchical. But France was overwhelmingly agricultural throughout the nineteenth century, and Prussia/Germany was not. By the 1880s he could no longer prevent the growing forces of Social Democracy, the Catholic Centre, and bourgeois liberalism from representing their constituents. He had not used universal suffrage as anything other than a temporary tactic and it backfired. By the end of his career, no pro-government majority could be constructed without concessions, which Bismarck rejected.
In March of 1890 he explained to the State Ministry how he intended to provoke the Reichstag with reactionary legislation, to create a split between all the ‘enemies’ and the established order. He would then get the princes who made the Constitution of 1870 to unmake it and with that decision end the Reichstag with its irksome universal suffrage. To stay in power he would destroy the Reich of 1870, his greatest creation.
In 1863 when Bismarck used universal suffrage as a means to a political end, neither he nor anybody else could imagine that in three decades Germany would dominate central Europe with its heavy industries, its excellent technological institutes, its skilled, literate, and increasingly urban workforces, its mines and mills, its railroads, steamships, telephones and telegraphs, its thriving ports and harbours, a vigorous shipbuilding industry, its great trading companies and giant factories, its advanced medical facilities, its physics and chemistry and excellent engineering. It had the best army, the second largest navy, a huge trade surplus, and an archaic government of country squires. Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen warned that such a mix was not stable.
Bismarck: A Life Page 64
