Bismarck: A Life

by Jonathan Steinberg

  Mass society meant capitalism and capitalism brought its liberal ideology and the demand for free trade, free movement of people and goods, free access to crafts and professions, banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, and traders. Into this thriving new capitalist state, Jews emerged as its most adept practitioners and its most ambivalent symbols. Anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century became a surrogate for everything that the Junkers, churches, peasants, and artisans most feared and distrusted. From 1811, with von der Marwitz’s ‘Jew State’, to July 1918, and Colonel Bauer’s condemnation of Jews as draft-dodging, black marketeers,19 the Prussian Junker class regarded Jews as enemies. They represented the corrupt and dangerous fluidity of money, capitalism, and markets. They controlled a significant share of newspapers and pioneered the department stores.

  By the late 1850s anti-Semitism was flourishing among the bourgeoisie as well as among the Junkers. Wagner published Jewishness in Music in 1850, and Gustav Freytag his anti-Semitic best-seller in 1855. By 1865 the main Protestant church newspaper could compare reformed Jews to vermin. The crash of 1873 and the resultant depression made these views respectable and Heinrich Treitschke, Germany’s most prominent historian, adopted and made them acceptable to the upper orders of society. The Reverend Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher, took them into court circles and converted the young Prince and Princess William of Prussia and General Alfred and Marie, Count and Countess von Waldersee. From top to bottom anti-Semitism flourished in Bismarck’s Germany.

  In March 1890 the Kaiser had to replace Herbert Bismarck with a new Foreign Secretary. It said a lot about the wasteland Bismarck left behind that not one of the seven senior ambassadors had the necessary qualities. Friedrich Wilhelm Count zu Limburg-Stirum (1835–1912) clearly did but Phili Eulenburg rejected him, because, as he wrote to the Kaiser, Limburg Stirum ‘was of Jewish extraction on his mother’s side, which permeates his being’.20 Wilhelm II furiously upbraided Bismarck for ‘collusion’ with ‘Jesuits and Jews’.

  Bismarck shared all of these prejudices and expressed them regularly. On the other hand, he clearly thought highly of Lassalle, got on well with Disraeli, Eduard Simon, and Ludwig Bamberger. He shared and often expressed loathing and disdain for Jews but he himself took no part in the extreme anti-Semitism of the Treitschke kind. On the other hand, he did great damage to Jews in Germany indirectly, because he took no steps to enforce the laws or protect Jewish citizens during the crisis of 1880. He used anti-Semitism to attack the Progressive party in order to destroy its ‘Jewish’ leadership.

  Bismarck always destroyed ‘enemies’ and hence he let the anti-Semitic agitation of the 1870s and 1880s run because it would undermine Eduard Lasker and the left Liberals, whom Bismarck considered Jews, whether or not they actually were. A party which believed in free speech, free press, parliamentary immunity, separation of church and state, free markets, abolition of the death penalty, constitutional monarchy, representative cabinets, that is, the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, must be crushed as an ‘enemy of the Reich’ and as ‘Jewish’. As von der Marwitz claimed, such reforms were advocated by persons who wanted ‘den neuen Judenstaat’. For Bismarck the way to split the liberal ‘revolutionary’ movement, a typical example of Bismarckian paranoia, lay in anti-Semitism. If he could drive a wedge of anti-Semitism between the Jews and respectable German progressives, the Progressive Party would lack the leadership and cutting edge provided by the Jews. He used the same wedge technique by trying to slide the Vatican between the Catholic masses and the Centre Party. Hatred fired the energy with which he drove his wedge in both cases. Thus, when Lasker, the courageous, incorruptible leader of the Progressives, died in New York in 1884, Bismarck took his revenge on the ‘dumb Jewboy’,21 as he called Lasker, by sending back the message of condolence passed by the US House of Representatives.

  Bismarck certainly did not create the anti-Semitism, which was universal at all levels of German society, but he used it to crush his enemies irrespective of the consequences. Anti-Semitism and its anti-liberal poison passed into the bloodstream of Germany to become virulent in the overheated atmosphere of the First World War and to become lethal in its aftermath. That too was a Bismarckian legacy, and it is richly ironic that Kaiser William dismissed Bismarck in March 1890 because he had been consorting ‘with Jesuits and Jews’.

  By the 1890s, rather to his surprise, Bismarck had become genuinely popular. He drew huge crowds to hail him on his trip to Vienna in 1892 and enjoyed the homage of the German people. His image became an icon, a symbol of the German nation. When Bismarck died, as the poet Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’,

  The currents of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

  Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

  And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.22

  What did these admirers see in him? We all know the picture of the stern figure with his heavy eyebrows and moustache, in uniform, often with a glittering Pickelhaube on his head. He became the Iron Chancellor, the all-powerful, all-wise, genius-statesman, the man who unified Germany. His image hung in every schoolroom and over many a hearth. He embodied and manifested the greatness of Germany. The image became itself a burden to his successors. He made it impossible, as Caprivi wished, that Germany should get along with ‘normal people’. Germany had to have a genius-statesman as its ruler. Kaiser Wilhelm II outdid the Iron Chancellor in military display but failed the test. He could not control himself, still less the complicated ramshackle structure that Bismarck had left him. The First World War destroyed much of Bismarck’s Germany and defeat ended the monarchies in all the many German states. In 1925 the citizens of the unloved Weimar Republic elected Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg (1847–1934), a Prussian field marshal, to be their President. Hindenburg, born in Posen on 2 October 1847, had gone to the typical Kadettenanstalt, to which Junker nobility sent their sons, and become an officer in the 3rd Regiment of the Foot Guards. He led his troops at the Battle of Königgrätz, ‘which became for him all his life the greatest event in his own personal development and for the glory of Prussian arms’.23 He belonged to, and had grown up in, Bismarck’s world and looked it. He had the same frown, the same military severity and bulk. Historians of Germany often speak of him as an ‘ersatz Kaiser’ or a Kaiser substitute, but I think rather that he represented an ‘ersatz Bismarck’, a surrogate for the Iron Chancellor. It was Hindenburg, the last ruling Junker, who handed Adolf Hitler the office that Bismarck had created—that of Reich Chancellor. His only reservation typically had to do not so much with Hitler’s policy but his rank. Hitler had been only a corporal and Hindenburg found that fact deeply distasteful. Every wrinkle in the fossilized Prussian Field Marshall stirred at the degrading need to elevate that ‘Bohemian Corporal’ to Bismarck’s chair. Bismarck’s legacy passed through Hindenburg to the last genius-statesman that Germany produced, Adolf Hitler, and the legacy was thus linear and direct between Bismarck and Hitler.

  Bismarck, the living human being; Bismarck, the genius-statesman; Bismarck the Iron Chancellor as icon, make up a complex legacy. Patriotic biographers left out the uncomfortable aspects of his actual life and the editors of documents omitted or censored them. A generation of conservative German historians exalted the wisdom, moderation, and vision of the statesman; the public and propagandists exalted the strong man, the essential German. The real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac, and misogynist, only appeared in biographies late in the twentieth century. What the three Bismarck images have in common as phenomena is the absence of the redeeming human virtues: kindness, generosity, compassion, humility, abstinence, patience, liberality, and tolerance. Bismarck the man, Bismarck the statesman, Bismarck the icon embodied none of those virtues.

  There are deep ironies in the career of Otto von Bismarck: the civilian always in uniform, the hysterical hypochondriac as the symbol of iron consistency, the successes which become failures, the achievement of supreme power in a state too modern
and too complex for him to run, the achievement of greater success than anybody in modern history which turned out to be a Faustian bargain. For twenty-eight years he crushed opposition, cowed cabinets, poured hatred, scorn, and anger on political opponents in public and private. It required courage of a high order to resist the Chancellor. Almost nobody dared. He smashed the possibility of responsible parliaments in 1878 when he used the two attempts to assassinate the Kaiser to destroy moderate bourgeois liberalism. He persecuted Catholics and Socialists. He respected no law and tolerated no opposition. His legacy in culture was literally nothing. He had no interest in the arts, never went to a museum, only read lyric poetry from his youth or escapist literature. He paid no attention to scientists or historians unless he could enlist them like Treitschke. He was the most supple political practitioner of the nineteenth century but his skill had no purpose other than to prop up an antiquated royal semi-absolutism—and to satisfy himself. The means were Olympian, the ends tawdry and pathetic. All that fuss to give Kaiser William II the ability to dislocate rational government and cause international unrest. Sir Edward Grey compared Germany to a huge battleship without a rudder. Bismarck arranged it that way; only he could steer it. He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state. He preferred to shoot workers rather than to listen to their complaints. He made his Junker friends into enemies and then ridiculed them. He mocked their Christian beliefs and offended their faith and values.

  This biography began with Max Weber’s analysis of legitimacy which he set out in a lecture in 1918. In the same year, he wrote his ‘Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany’. Section 1 asks ‘what was the legacy of Bismarck?’ Max Weber, born under Bismarck in 1864, grew up in the home of committed National Liberals and knew the main figures in politics. He was both participant and observer. Weber began the section with Bismarck’s destruction of National Liberalism in 1878 and the resulting dilemma which he had created. Bismarck refused to govern with the Catholic Centre but could not govern without it. He then turned to the actual legacy of Bismarck’s long tenure of office:

  He left a nation totally without political education … totally bereft of political will [italics in the original—JS] accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them. And further as a result of his improper exploitation of monarchical sentiment to conceal his own power politics in party battles, it had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of ‘monarchical government’.24

  This crushing verdict by Germany’s greatest social scientist brings us full circle to the lecture room in Munich in October 1918 when Weber first explained the idea of charismatic leadership. Bismarck lacked the attributes that we normally associate with the charismatic leader. He moved no crowds at mass meetings and in parliament he roused his listeners more by insults and scorn than by overwhelming oratory, but he had that ‘demonic’ power that made him an irresistible political figure and a disastrous one.

  The deepest and most impenetrable irony lies in Bismarck’s own personality.

  He ruled Germany by making himself indispensable to a decent, kindly old man, who happened to be a king. He drew the King from his family and inserted himself between man and wife and between father and son. He worked his personal magic in that tiny space and his rule depended absolutely on the bond between William I and his chief minister and on nothing else. He stirred the hatred of the Queen and of the Crown Princess by his control of their husband and father-in-law. Both king and minister had terrible rows, burst into tears, and collapsed afterwards. In the end Bismarck got his way but paid a price in physical symptoms, sleeplessness, attacks of neuralgia, stomach problems, and anxiety symptoms. He could not live without the power that he extracted from the royal person but could not live with it either. For twenty-six years Bismarck and the King lived in this constant love/hate relationship. The King retained his good temper and serenity through all that time. Bismarck could not. The ultimate and terrible irony of Bismarck’s career lay in his powerlessness. Contemporaries called him a ‘dictator’ or a ‘despot’ but he knew better. Perhaps that is why he insisted that the only epitaph on his simple grave should tell the truth about his career: ‘A faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.’

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Schoeps, 15–16.

  2. Bronsart, 249.

  3. Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, i. 206.

  4. Holstein, Memoirs, 52.

  5. ‘Politik als Beruf’, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Munich, 1921), 396–450. Originally a speech at Munich University, 1918, published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblot, Munich. .

  6. Ibid.

  7. Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Memoirs, 429, Berlin, 18 June 1890.

  8. Börner, William I, 221.

  9. Busch, 4 Oct. 1878, ii. 197.

  10. Bronsart, 212.

  11. Urbach, 69.

  12. Craig, Fontane, 115.

  13. Ibid. 116.

  14. Stosch to Crown Prince, 24 Jan. 1873, Hollyday, 126.

  15. Stosch, 120.

  16. Roon, i. 355–6.

  17. Ibid. ii. 239.

  18. Ibid. ii. 260–1.

  19. Engelberg, i. 315–16.

  20. Craig, The Politics, 137.

  21. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), para. 97, p. 61.

  22. Motley, Family, 297.

  23. Spitzemberg, 304.

  24. Tiedemann, 13, 15.

  25. Bismarck Die Gesammelten Werke, ed. Wolfgang Windelband and Werner Frauendienst, 1st edn. (Berlin: Deutscheveralgsanstalt, 1933). Abbreviated below as GW.

  26. Tiedemann, 221.

  27. Lucius, 129–30.

  28. Ibid. 131.

  29. Holstein, Memoirs, 118.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Engelberg, Bismarck: Urpreusse und Reichsgründer.

  2. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 1.

  3. ‘Primary Source’. .

  4. Sigurd von Kleist, Geschichte des Geschlects v. Kleist, 5. .

  5. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 241.

  6. Theodor Fontane, Irrungen Wirrungen (1888) in Theodor Fontane, Gesammelte Werke: Jubiläumsausgabe. Erste Reihe in fünf Bänden (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1919), 152ff.

  7. Spitzemberg, 291.

  8. Engelberg, i. 126.

  9. Stern, 40.

  10. Clark, Iron Kingdom, p. xix.

  11. Fontane, Irrungen Wirrungen, 154.

  12. Roon, ii. 86.

  13. Bucholz, 30–1.

  14. Paret, 4.

  15. Burke, para. 322, p. 192.

  16. Ibid. para. 322, p. 192.

  17. Ibid. para. 77, p. 48.

  18. Gentz, 19.

  19. Epstein, 436.

  20. Sweet, 21.

  21. Ibid. 28.

  22. Guglia, 147–8.

  23. Mann, 40-1.

  24. Frie, 57.

  25. Guglia, 33.

  26. Alexander von der Marwitz to Rahel Varnhagen in Frie, 58.

  27. Marwitz, Preussens Verfall und Aufstieg, 184.

  28. 9 May 1811, Last Representation of the Estates of the Lebus Circle, joined by the Beeskow and Storkow Circles meeting in Frankfurt an der Oder to His Majesty the King, Marwitz, Preussens Verfall, 241ff.

  29. Marwitz, Preussens Verfall, 224.

  30. Frie, 280.

  31. Ibid. 281.

  32. Marwitz, Preussens Verfall, 204.

  33. .

  34. Brophy, Popular Culture, 14.

  35. Ibid. 22–4.

  36. Ibid. 257.

  37. Brophy, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 25.

  38. Keinemann, 20.

  39. Ibid.
20.

  40. Provinzial-Correspondenz (PC), 12/33, 19 Aug. 1874, p. 1. .

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Engelberg, i. 61.

  2. Ibid. 48.

  3. Bismarck to Malwine, GW xiv. 29.

  4. Engelberg, i. 102.

  5. Ibid. 51.

  6. Wienfort, 15.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Bismarck to Johanna, 23 Feb. 1847, GW xiv. 67.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Engelberg, i. 37 ff.

  11. Neue deutsche Biographie, xvii. 36. .

  12. Epstein, 593.

  13. Sweet, 18.

  14. Ibid. 8.

  15. Ibid. 33.

  16. Ibid. 34.

  17. Ibid. 35.

  18. Engelberg, i. 46.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Gentz, i. 243–4, 1 Feb. 1798.

  21. Neue deutsche Biographie, xvii. 36. .

  22. Engelberg, i. 64.

  23. Ibid. 107.

  24. Pflanze, i. 34, n. 3.

  25. Engelberg, i. 100.

  26. Pflanze, i. 33–4, Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, 49–50, Lucius von Ballhausen, 9 Apr. 1878, von Keudell, June 1864, pp. 160–1.

  27. Pflanze, i. 38.

  28. Engelberg, i. 97, quoting Marcks.

  29. Lady Emily Russell to HM Queen Victoria, 15 Mar. 1873, Empress Frederick Letters, 131–2.

  30. Spitzemberg, 248–50.

  31. Engelberg, i. 93.

  32. Keudell, 160.

  33. Bismarck to Mother, 27 Apr. 1821, GW xiv. 1.

  34. Bismarck to Mother, Easter 1825, GW xiv. 1.

  35. Engelberg, i. 104.

  36. Bismarck to Bernhard, Kniephof, 25 July 1829, GW xiv. 1.