10

‘The Guest House of the Dead Jew’

At 12 I found him at lunch, as fresh and cheerful as possible, after he had once again spoken in the Reichstag, (which they now call the ‘Gasthof zum toten Juden’).

Baroness Spitzemberg, 15 March 1884, Spitzemberg, Tagebuch, 205

On 11 January 1878 Bill, Bismarck’s son, told Tiedemann that the Kaiser was ‘very angry’ because Count Eulenburg ‘as a joke’ had shown him the new cabinet list composed of the most prominent National Liberals and Progressives—‘Bennigsen, Forckenbeck, Stauffenberg, Rickert etc.’¹ On 18 January 1878 Tiedemann on orders from Bismarck had a meeting with Bennigsen, who regarded his appointment to the ministry as ‘beyond doubt’ but insisted on ‘one or two colleagues from the National Liberal party’ joining the cabinet with him.² On 19 January 1878 Tiedemann travelled to Varzin to report on the meeting. A week later in Berlin, Rudolf von Bennigsen told Lucius at a parliamentary dinner that the Liberals held two trump cards:

1) the rising need for new money which cannot be satisfied without our help;
2) the approaching end in two years of the Septennat [the seven-year Army bill which fixed the financial contribution and the size of the army—JS]. … If an understanding is now reached between parliament and government, a steady development will be guaranteed for the next twenty years; if not, incalculable complications could ensue.³

On 18 February the National Liberal caucus met. Julius Hölder, a deputy from Württemberg, was there and recorded the event in his diary. Hölder belonged to the pro-Bismarckian wing of the National Liberals in the Reichstag but in Württemberg’s parliament often curbed the enthusiasm of the Bismarckians on state level.⁴ Now Hölder accepted that a showdown with Bismarck had to be faced because

a truly responsible government is necessary, one in close touch with the Reichstag’s majority … the grant of new taxes must be kept in hand as a means of pressure not only against the Bundesrat but also (as it appeared to me, at least according to the sense of their remarks) against Bismarck and the Kaiser in order (briefly said) to force a parliamentary administration of the Reich. In particular, the finances of the Reich and Prussia must come into one person’s (Bennigsen) hands.⁵

This moment falls into the category devised by the late A. J. P. Taylor to describe German history: ‘a series of turning points where nothing turns’. Had Bismarck raised an eyebrow or lifted a finger of approbation, three National Liberals would have joined the cabinet and Germany might have moved slowly towards a more parliamentary regime. Bismarck would have shared power, made compromises, and accepted opposition as a necessary element in all political life. He would have surrendered his dedication to a semi-absolutist monarchy and settled for less than complete control. Can Bismarck ever have considered such a possibility? There is no evidence that he did and much that he could not have. The negotiations with Bennigsen fell into the category that Morier called ‘his combinations’, a move on the chessboard, never more.

Before Bismarck’s motives could be tested, events came to his aid. On 7 February Pius IX died. Suddenly Bismarck had room to manoeuvre. Peace with the Vatican in exchange for pressure on the Centre to get rid of Windthorst? A possible Blue-Black (Conservative-Catholic) majority in the Reichstag to move toward protectionism and conservative schemes of government? Above all, he could get rid of the Liberals, too bourgeois, too pedantic about rights and representation. He suddenly felt much better, and on 14 January he returned to Berlin. He reappeared in the Reichstag for the first time for months. On 19 February Bismarck made his ‘honest broker’ speech in which he invited the Great Powers to a conference on the Russo-Turkish War to be held in Berlin. Three days later, on 22 February 1878, Bismarck announced to a startled Reichstag that ‘My aim is a national tobacco monopoly … as a provisional measure and a stepping-stone …’⁶

The National Liberals were appalled and placed in a dilemma. A few weeks earlier Bismarck had been chatting with Bennigsen about the terms for three National Liberal ministers in the Prussian cabinet and now he came out for state intervention and a repudiation of the free market, then and now an essential liberal demand. Bennigsen wrote to Max von Forckenbeck, the president of the Chamber, to ask: ‘Do you not agree that we cannot participate in setting up this monopoly? If so, I shall go to the Chancellor and tell him that our negotiations are at an end.’⁷ In the Prussian State Ministry his Finance Minister and Vice-President Otto Camphausen (1812–96) resigned because he could not accept interventions in free trade.⁸

In these tense days, Ludwig Bamberger, the Liberal finance expert and long-serving Reichstag deputy, sat opposite Bismarck at a dinner and recorded from across the table certain features of his face and conversation:

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. Though he had given two long speeches in the Landtag, he chatted from 5.30 to 8.30 without a pause, listened only to himself and will not be distracted from the thread of thoughts that he spins.⁹

Nothing in Bismarck’s personality suggested to Bamberger that he would enjoy a parliamentary regime.

On 20 February Cardinal Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci was elected Pope and took the name of Leo XIII. He was 68, and his reign was expected to be short. In fact, he lived until 20 July 1903, when he died at the age of 93. Although an aristocrat as Pius IX had been before him, Leo XIII took a very different attitude to the modern world. His famous encyclical Rerum Novarum of 15 May 1891, in which he welcomed the discoveries of science and the productivity of industry but asserted that human labour could not be considered as just a factor of production, set the stage for a new Catholic relation to the industrial world and its social problems. Bismarck now had a possible partner at the highest level of the church. That was the first change in the political constellation.

The second happened a month later when on 31 March Wilhelm von Kardorff (1828–1907) had an audience with Bismarck. Kardorff, a wealthy industrialist and landlord, had been one of the founders of the Bismarckian Reich Party and had become its most eloquent orator and effective leader. He made a fabulous fortune during the Gründerzeit but swung to protectionism earlier than his party. He founded the Free Economic Union in 1874 to advocate protective tariffs and in 1876 the most important industrial pressure group, the Central Association of German Industrialists.¹⁰ When he arrived, Bismarck startled him by telling him that he now wanted ‘moderate protective and finance tariffs’ and continued:

Earlier I was myself a free trader, being an estate owner, but now I am a complete convert and want to make good my earlier errors … I want tariffs on tobacco, spirits, possibly sugar, certainly petroleum, perhaps coffee, and I am not afraid of grain tariffs which could be very useful to us against Russia and also Austria.¹¹

In April Bismarck began to work on new legislation for the era in which he could dispense with the Liberals. High on his agenda was a plan to crush the Social Democratic Party which had gained votes and benefited from the long depression. He drafted a law which would have given the Bundesrat exceptional powers to suppress publications and organizations which advocated Social Democratic aims. On 24 May 1878 the Reichstag rejected the exceptional legislation to limit socialist activity, 251 to 57, led largely by Liberal opposition to the bill’s violation of civil rights.¹² Bismarck’s indifference to the defeat surprised Tiedemann:

When the Reichstag majority disturbs his plans, he usually does not lack caustic remarks in airing his displeasure. But this time he limited himself to a few joking remarks about the unfortunate ministers whose duty it had been to defend the ill-fated bill.¹³

For once the shrewd Tiedemann missed the point. The Liberals had voted against internal security. Bismarck knew that they had handed him the best weapon he could find. Again Macmillan’s ‘events, dear boy’ would soon give him the moment to use it. On 11 May 1878 a worker named Max Hödel fired three shots at the Kaiser as he rode with his daughter, the Grand Duchess of Baden, in an open carriage along Unter den Linden. Nobody was hurt and Hödel was arrested. On 2 June Dr Karl Nobiling, a failed academic, tried again from a second-story window overlooking the same avenue and this time the Kaiser was hit by pellets in three places. The wounds would not have been serious but the Kaiser was by now 81 years old.¹⁴ Tiedemann’s account of how Bismarck reacted to the news must be one of the most remarkable eye-witness pictures of Bismarck’s quickness of mind and political adroitness ever written. Here it is in full. The scene took place in Friedrichsruh that afternoon.

As I was underway to the Aumühle and Friedrichsruh Park, I caught sight of the Prince, who, accompanied by his dogs, was walking slowly in the bright sunshine across the field. I walked towards him and joined him after a brief greeting. He was in excellent humour and chatted about his walk and on the beneficial effect which a long walk in the forest air had on his nerves. After a short pause, I said, ‘some very important telegrams have arrived’. He answered in a joking tone, ‘and they are so urgent that we have to attend to them here in the open field?’ I replied, ‘unfortunately! They contain shocking news. Another attempt has been made on the Kaiser’s life and this time the shots have hit him. The Kaiser is seriously hurt.’ With a jolt, the Prince stopped. He drove his oaken walking stick into the ground and said taking a deep breath as if a mental lightning bolt had struck him, ‘then we dissolve the Reichstag’. Quickly he walked back to the house and while walking inquired about the details of the assassination attempt.¹⁵

The instant ‘combination’, as Morier put it, made him the most gifted political tactician of the nineteenth century. He saw in a flash that he could run a scare campaign and get rid of the Liberal Party who would be accused of lack of patriotism. He returned at once to Berlin and went to see the Kaiser in hospital. Hildegard von Spitzemberg was there when he returned:

The Prince had just come from a conversation with the Kaiser. The strong man was so deeply moved that he had to take a drink before he could speak. ‘The old man lies there, propped up in a bed, in the middle of the room, the hands wrapped entirely in gauze and stretched out far from his body, on his head an ice-pack—a pitiful sight! Behind him there was a lamp. I found him thinner in the face but businesslike as always and as clear; it is obvious that he suffers a lot, then, although he had a lot to say on matters that really interest him, after a while he nodded to me to go away.’ From there the Prince went to the Crown Prince for several hours, who was at first annoyed that he had not been present at the hospital conversation. The Prince told Carl that the Crown Prince had demanded security for his person, because everything indicated that the Internationale was behind the two assassination attempts. They ‘want to sweep Kaiser and Crown Prince away so that a child comes to the throne and they will have a free hand’. Today there was a grand Council of Ministers. The trouble is that the case of the temporary incapacity of the Kaiser has not been considered in the Reich Constitution, and the Crown Prince cannot step in without the declaration of a full regency. There are so many decisive decisions to take: state of emergency, dissolution of the Reichstag etc. The Prince has let a snow-white full beard grow so that he looks ridiculously like his brother Bernhard. In the evening he came back to the Kaiser several times: ‘I cannot get the old man out of my mind’. So heavy and bleak was our mood, the old firm German loyalty is broken, a stain on our honour that nothing will wash away.¹⁶

A Crown Council under Crown Prince approved the dissolution of the Reichstag in spite of National Liberal protests.¹⁷ On 30 July 1878 German voters went to the polls with a turnout of 63.4 per cent, the highest since 1871. The National Liberals lost 4.1 per cent of their vote and 29 seats, and the Progressives 1 per cent and 9 seats, while the German Reich Party, Bismarck’s party, won 57 seats, a gain of 19 seats, and secured 13.6 per cent of the vote, more than the Kreuzzeitung Conservatives, who only secured 13.0 per cent of the vote with 59 seats. The Centre, solid as always, returned the same delegation plus one new member.¹⁸ Conservatives and Catholics together now had 210 seats, eleven more than an absolute majority of the 397 seats in the Reichstag. On the other hand the two Liberal parties with 125 seats together with the 94 Centre deputies made up a majority as well. Bismarck could play off each of the main blocks against the other. The Liberal threat had been banished and, as it happens, forever. Liberal votes declined until, on 30 July 1932, in Hitler’s triumphant summer election before the seizure of power, the two great parties of 1871 had dwindled to 1 per cent each of the votes cast.

The elections took place not only against the background of a security panic but in the immediate aftermath of the Congress of Berlin, the most glittering summit since Metternich’s Congress of Vienna. On 11 June 1878, a Tuesday evening, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Earl of Beaconsfield, British Prime Minister, arrived in Berlin. Disraeli may have been the only statesman at the Congress who matched Bismarck in cleverness and flair. They found, as we shall see, that they liked each other. The official language of the Congress was, of course, French, which Disraeli spoke with a bad accent and the vulgar vocabulary he had acquired in his extravagant youth. Odo Russell, the British ambassador, who had been alerted by the staff that the ‘Chief’ had decided to speak French, welcomed him and used Disraeli’s favourite device to manipulate people, flattery:

A dreadful rumour had reached him that Beaconsfield would address the Congress in French. That would be, said Lord Odo, a very great disappointment to the Plenipotentiaries. ‘They knew that they have the greatest living master of English oratory and are looking forward to your speech as the intellectual treat of their lives.’ Lord Odo tells us that … [he] never knew whether he took the hint or accepted the compliment.¹⁹

Disraeli arrived rather unwell and at 74 somewhat fragile. He also bore the not inconsiderable burden of war or peace. The Queen and cabinet had come to the conclusion that Russian expansion had to be stopped at all costs and a fleet had been sent to the sea of Marmora. Odo Russell wrote the next day to his brother, Hastings, the Duke of Bedford,²⁰ ‘Lord Beaconsfield seems excited, Lord Salisbury anxious and all the other Plenipos are in a nervous state which is scarcely pleasant.’²¹

Disraeli had developed a close relationship to Queen Victoria and wrote to her in extravagant terms throughout the Congress. The elegant, literary, Conservative leader pleased her much more than the stern, moralizing, Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). ‘You have heard me called a flatterer,’ Disraeli said to Matthew Arnold, ‘and it is true. Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’²² This note to the Queen is not untypical:

Distant from your Majesty in a foreign land and with so awful a responsibility, he feels more keenly how entirely his happiness depends on his doing duty to your Majesty and your Majesty’s kind appreciation of his efforts.²³

On 12 June Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria to tell her that, to his surprise, Bismarck had insisted on seeing him on his arrival.

Accordingly at a quarter to ten o’clock, Lord Beaconsfield waited on the Chancellor. They had not met for sixteen years but that space of time did not seem adequate to produce the startling change which Lord B. observed in the Chancellor’s appearance. A tall pallid man with a wasp-like waist was now represented by an extremely stout person with a ruddy countenance on which now he is growing a silvery beard. In his manner there was no change except he was not perhaps quite so energetic, but frank and unaffected as before … He talked a great deal but well and calmly, no attempt at those grotesque expressions for which he is, or has been, celebrated, … B let us deal with the great things that concern England for England is quite ready to go to war with Russia.²⁴

On 13 June 1878 the Congress of Berlin opened and Disraeli described the proceedings in a long letter to Queen Victoria:

At two o’clock, the congress met in the Radzivill Palace—a noble hall just restored and becoming all the golden coats and glittering stars that filled it. Lord B. believes that every day is not to be so ceremonious and costumish. Prince Bismarck, a giant of a man, 6 feet 2 at least and proportionately huge, was chosen President. In the course of the morning, Prince Gortchakoff, a shriveled old man, was leaning on the arm of his gigantic rival and Prince Bismarck, being seized with a sudden fit of rheumatism, both fell to the ground and unhappily Prince Bismarck’s dog, seeing his master apparently struggling with an opponent, sprang to the rescue. It was said that Prince Gortchakoff was not maimed or bitten thro’ the energetic efforts of his companion … At seven o’clock was a gala banquet at the Old Palace, a scene of extraordinary splendour. It is a real palace, but, strange to say, all the magnificent rooms and galleries of reception are where in the days of Queen Anne poor poets used to reside: the garrets. It must have been much more than 100 steps before Lord B. reached the gorgeous scene, and he thinks he would have sunk under it, had not, fortunately, the master of ceremonies been shorter-breathed than himself, so there were many halts of the caravan.²⁵

Before the conference, the Russian had conceded that the entire Treaty of San Stefano would be negotiable and the British had conceded that the decisions of the Congress would be unanimous, in effect, to give the Russian a veto. Odo Russell turned out to be at least as good in the flattery game as his chief, as he wrote to Hastings:

I overwhelm Lord Beaconsfield with honours and respect and give him my place at the table as if he were the Queen or the Prince of Wales, at which he seems well pleased, for he calls me ‘his dear and distinguished colleague’ and assures me that one of his chief objects in coming to Berlin was to see my ‘dear wife who is the most agreeable woman he ever knew …’²⁶

Bismarck puzzled and discomfited Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, the Foreign Secretary, by his odd behaviour. On 16 June Disraeli and Salisbury had been invited by the Emperor and Empress to wait on them at Potsdam, but, as he wrote in his diary, Bismarck insisted on seeing him before he left:

Before I went down to Potsdam, I had by his invitation an interview with Prince Bismarck, which lasted upwards of an hour. What his object was, or is, I have not yet discovered. There was no business done; it was a monologue, a rambling amusing, egotistical autobiography. As His Highness had requested this interview, I would not open on any point. Lord Salisbury, equally invited, had an audience almost immediately after me and of the same surprising character … not a word of business from Prince Bismarck, either to Lord Salisbury or to myself.²⁷

The next day, 17 June, he had another long exposure to the oddities of Bismarck. There was a formal dinner—a very rare occasion—at the residence of the Bismarcks, as Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria:

In the afternoon at 6 o’clock great dinner at P. Bismarck’s. All these banquets are very well done. There must have been sixty guests. The Princess was present. She is not fair to see tho’ her domestic influence is said to be irresistible. I sate on the right hand of P. Bismarck and, never caring much to eat in public, I could listen to his Rabelaisian monologues: endless revelations of things he ought not to mention. He impressed on me never to trust princes or courtiers; that his illness was not, as people supposed, brought on by the French war but by the horrible conduct of his Sovereign etc etc. In the archives of his family remain the documents, the royal letters which accuse him after all his services of being a traitor. He went on in such a vein that I was at last obliged to tell him that, instead of encountering ‘duplicity’ which he said was universal among Sovereigns, I served one who was the soul of candor and justice and whom all her Ministers loved. The contrast between his voice which is sweet and gentle with his ogre-like form, is striking. He is apparently well-read, familiar with modern literature. His characters of personages extremely piquant. Recklessly frank. He is bound hand and foot to Austria whether he thinks them right or wrong: but always adds: ‘I offered myself to England and Lord Derby would not notice my application for six weeks and then rejected it’.²⁸

The German Ambassador to Russia, von Schweinitz, had become seriously worried about the Congress and wrote to his wife that ‘the conference is going very badly. Everybody against Russia except us. Andrassy makes a play for old Beaconsfield, flatters him, everything he says is wonderful and will vote in everything with him against Russia.’²⁹ Bismarck suddenly got serious, and as Disraeli recorded in his diary, took an unusual step on 21 June:

I was engaged to dine today at a grand party at the English embassy, but about 5 o’clock Prince Bismarck called on me, and asked how we were getting on and expressed his anxiety and threw out some plans for a compromise, such as limiting the troops of the Sultan etc etc. I told him that in London we had compromised this question, and in deference to the feelings of the Emperor of Russia, and it was impossible to recede. ‘Am I to understand it is an ultimatum?’ ‘You are.’ ‘I am obliged to go to the Crown Prince now. We should talk over this matter. Where do you dine today?’ ‘At the English Embassy.’ ‘I wish you could dine with me. I am alone at 6 o’clock.’ I accepted his invitation, sent my apology to Lady Odo, dined with Bismarck, the Princess, his daughter, his married niece, and two sons. He was very agreeable indeed at dinner, made no allusion to politics, and, tho’ he ate and drank a great deal, talked more.

After dinner, we retired to another room, where he smoked and I followed his example. I believe I gave the last blow to my shattered constitution, but I felt it was absolutely necessary. I had an hour and a half of the most interesting conversation, entirely political. He was convinced that the ultimatum was not a sham, and, before I went to bed, I had the satisfaction of knowing that St Petersburg had surrendered.³⁰

The following morning, 22 June, at 10.30 a.m. Disraeli telegraphed the Queen and Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘Russia surrenders and accepts the English scheme for the European frontier of the Empire, and its military and political rule by the Sultan. Bismarck says, “There is again a Turkey-in-Europe”. “It is all due to your energy and firmness” was the Queen’s reply.’³¹

A few days later, on 26 June, Disraeli sketched another vivid portrait of Bismarck for Lady Bradford, his special confidante.

Bismarck soars above all: he is six foot four I shd think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, wh. singularly contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity. 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. He loads me with kindness, and tho’ often preoccupied with an immediate dissolution of parliament on his hands; an internecine war with the Socialists, 100s of whom he puts daily into prison in defiance of all law, he yesterday extracted from me a promise that, before I depart, I will once more dine with him quite alone. His palace has large and beautiful gardens. He has never been out since I came here, except the memorable day when he called on me to ascertain wh[ether] my policy was an ultimatum. I convinced him that it was, and the Russians surrendered a few hours afterwards.³²

Disraeli was delighted to find ‘all the ladies are reading my novels from the Empress downwards. The ladies are generally reading Henrietta Temple, which being a “love story” and written forty years ago, is hardly becoming an Envoy Extraordinary.’³³ Odo Russell found, as he wrote in a letter to the Foreign Office, that even the Chancellor ‘is deeply interested in Lord Beaconsfield’s novels which he is reading once again. Prince Bismarck informed Monsier de St. Vallier that, while he read novels, his mind enjoyed perfect rest, because it ceased to govern Germany for the time being—but that if he did not write novels, it was because the government of Germany required the whole of his undivided creative powers.’³⁴

No doubt Bismarck and Disraeli dominated the Congress of Berlin, and equally there is no doubt that Disraeli found Bismarck a fascinating and bizarre figure. Bismarck behaved in an unusual way to Disraeli as well. He called upon him, something he neverdid after he achieved his great status, and he invited him to a family dinner, a confidence accorded to literally no other foreign statesman. I am not even certain that Odo Russell ever enjoyed the intimacy of the Bismarck family. Here is Disraeli’s account of that memorable evening on 5 July 1878:

I dined with Bismarck alone i.e. with his family who disappear after the repast, and then we talked and smoked, If you do not smoke under such circumstances, you look like a spy, taking down his conversation in your mind. Smoking in common puts him at ease. He asked me whether racing was much encouraged in England. I replied never more so … ‘Then,’ cried the Prince eagerly, ‘there never will be socialism in England. You are a happy country. You are safe as long as the people are devoted to racing. Here a gentleman cannot ride down the street without twenty persons saying to themselves or each other, “Why has that fellow a horse, and I have not one?” In England the more horses a nobleman has, the more popular he is, So long as the English are devoted to racing, Socialism has no chance with you.’ This gives you as slight idea of the style of his conversation. His views on all subjects are original, but there is no strain, no effort at paradox. He talks as Montaigne writes. When he heard about Cyprus, he said ‘you have done a wise thing. This is progress. It will be popular; a nation likes progress’. His idea of progress was evidently seizing something. He said he looked upon our relinquishment of the Ionian Isles as the first sign of our decadence. Cyprus put us all right again.³⁵

Bismarck ran the Congress of Berlin entirely by himself. He used three languages interchangeably—English, French, and German—and composed the necessary documents in French either by hand or in dictation. He managed to get the business done in twenty sessions and negotiated a package of compromises. Britain gained Cyprus, a reduction of the size of Bulgaria, preservation of Turkish sovereignty over Macedonia and the Mediterranean coast. In other words, Russia could not affect the supply route to India. The straits remained under Turkish control. Russia received Bessarabia, Kars, Ardahan, and Batum but none of that satisfied the Pan-Slav groups and the Russian imperialists. As a compensation, the Austrians gained control of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sandjak of Novi-Bazar. Bismarck had rearranged south-eastern Europe, avoided war, and increased his own and the prestige of the German Empire. In diplomatic matters he negotiated, cajoled, discussed, and compromised, all the forms of behaviour that he showed so rarely in domestic affairs. But in the end he had opted not to support Russia in order to maintain his impartiality and the Tsar and the court were offended.

After the glamour of the Congress he had to return to domestic affairs. During the summer at Bad Kissingen, he met Cardinal Aloisi Masella on a regular basis from 30 July to 16 August, but the negotiations with the Catholic church got nowhere. As he wrote to Falk on 8 August, ‘The Pope does not have the least influence on the Centre Party’ but he wanted nobody to know that. As he continued, ‘In my opinion the uncertainty must be maintained as long as possible. The belief in an approaching reconciliation between state and curia will unquestionably be beneficial for the conduct of the curia, the Centre and the liberal parties.’³⁶

On 9 September 1878 the new Reichstag met for the first time. A chastened and smaller National Liberal Party had already agreed to the adoption of a law against subversion. The question was only how severe to make it. A week later Bismarck returned to Berlin for the first reading of the Anti-Socialist Law.³⁷ One of the first speakers was none other than Hans von Kleist-Retzow, who made a fierce attack on Social Democracy and accused them of high treason:

I stick to the view that the whole of Social Democracy is the way to high treason, that they carry out the work of moles, they undermine the foundations of the state. Are then the things you do, the battle songs you sing on the streets—the Marseillaise of the future, just childrens’ games, are they lesser preparations as if somebody bought powder or shot? …

As Kleist finished, the Reich Chancellor came down from the ministers’ platform and went over to the old friend. Much moved, Bismarck reached out his hand and carried out before the whole country an act of reconciliation. Kleist too was deeply moved. Two days later he directed a thank you note to his old and now re-found friend:

Let me just before I go off thank you with all my heart that you recently gave me your hand after so long and so painful a separation. With great joy I see in the gesture an expression of your wish to restore the old friendship and familial band and the previous traffic between our houses.³⁸

The friendship never returned to the old basis and Kleist rarely saw Bismarck except in and around the House of Lords. It mattered very much to von Kleist; did it matter to Bismarck? He had lost his dear ‘Mot’, John Lothrop Motley, who died in London on 29 May 1877. He rarely saw ‘Flesch’, Alexander von Keyserlingk, the other college friend, whose scientific interests Bismarck did not share and whose estate lay in distant Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He began more and more to feel lonely and isolated.

On 23 September Bismarck left Berlin for Varzin but had to return because the committee on the socialist law had been unable to agree on the appeals procedures.³⁹ From 9 to 15 October a fierce debate raged on the question of civil rights. Eduard Lasker fought a last ditch battle to preserve the constitutional rights of the Socialists. On 11 October he found an unexpected ally. Ludwig Windthorst rose to make one of his great speeches:

‘Conservative’ means to conserve the given, legitimate institutions in State and Church. It does not mean to arm a government with omnipotence, with which it can modify those institutions at will. So long as you confuse conservatism withPolizeiwirtschaft [a police state] an alliance with you is certainly unthinkable.⁴⁰

Windthorst’s courageous stand at the head of a conservative Catholic Party reflected a position he had always held—that the defence of Catholic rights in the Kulturkampf covered all rights, the rights of everybody, Jews, Catholics, Socialists, or Atheists. The consistency, integrity, and sheer courage with which Windthorst fought Bismarck’s authoritarianism and violations of the law, often against the reactionary instincts of his own parliamentary party, deserve to be better known and honoured in the Federal Republic of Germany than they are. Even Lasker gave in under the pressure of what he saw as public opinion and confessed that ‘contempt for the laws should no longer be tolerated and the Deputies were almost challenged to vote for an exceptional law.’⁴¹ On 19 October 1878 the Reichstag passed the Anti-Socialist Law with 221 to 149 votes. The German Conservatives, Free Conservatives, and National Liberals created a pact to see the law through. The government had to accept a Lasker amendment in second reading that the law would in the first instance only last until September 1881 (2½ years).⁴² The law contained severe restrictions: ‘Paragraph 1. Associations which through Social Democratic, Socialist or Communist activities intend to overthrow the existing state and social order are to be forbidden.’ Paragraph 9 outlawed public meetings which urged the overthrow of state and society and paragraph 11 outlawed publications which did the same. A variety of other measures added to the burdens on the Socialist organizations.⁴³Bismarck blamed his new Minister of the Interior, yet another Eulenburg, cousin Botho Count zu Eulenburg (1831–1912), for the fact that the law continued to allow citizens to vote for socialists and did not take away rights of railways workers and other state employees to do so. Bismarck told Lucius, ‘I do not believe it possible to let citizens, legally proven to be socialists, retain the right to vote, the right to stand for election and the pleasure and privilege of sitting in the Reichstag.’⁴⁴

Before the vote on the Anti-Socialist Law on 17 October 1878, a group of deputies from three parties—87 from the Centre, 36 conservatives, and 27 liberals, amounting to 204 in total or a majority of the 397 Reichstag members—had formed ‘The Economic Association of the Reichstag’. It was chaired by Friedrich von Varnbüler from Württemberg, a long-time advocate of tariff protection. The Association showed that there was now a clear majority in favour of the abolition of free trade. This was the second great alteration in German politics. No bill had been introduced and details had to be worked out but the sense of the House was now clear.⁴⁵

On 23 October Bismarck left Berlin and returned to Friedrichsruh. On the way, Tiedemann noted that Bismarck hid the beer bottles from which he had been drinking under the table in the train every time it halted at a station. He explained to Tiedemann that the public should not be disillusioned about their Chancellor.⁴⁶ On 9 November Bismarck wrote to Emperor William I to apologize for his absence at the Landtag:

My health leaves much to be desired. I need for some time absolute rest, which I have not been able to enjoy for years past; I hope to find it at Friedrichsruh while the Landtag is sitting, and will not let my own weakness interfere with the gladness with which I hear through Lehndorff of your Majesty’s returning strength.⁴⁷

As mentioned earlier, Pflanze did the sums and found that between 14 May 1875 and the end of November 1878, of 1,275 total days, Bismarck spent 772 either at his estates or at spas, or more than two years away from Berlin.⁴⁸ The remarkable thing is how little rest Bismarck actually took when not in Berlin. He wrote memoranda, he saw ministers, he drafted legislation, and planted articles in the official press. For example, on 6 November official newspapers attacked the Centre for its failure to welcome peace moves between Leo XIII and Bismarck. The Provincial Correspondence wrote:

This striking behaviour is only understandable through the character, composition and leadership of the Centre Party, which for years has posed as the representative of the clerical interests of German Catholics but which in reality pursues purely political ends which have nothing to do with the real interests of the Roman Catholic Church.⁴⁹

For the next few years Bismarck tried to drive wedges into the crack between the Curia in Rome and the Centre Party in Germany and in the Reichstag. The crack existed. The Centre refused to act as the agent of the Vatican and demanded an autonomy which the Curia found difficult to accept. Bismarck sensed that tension and had the cunning to try to exploit it. Windthorst had the cunning to cut off the move before the crack widened. In response to the new campaign by Bismarck Windthorst introduced a bill on 11 December 1878 to allow those religious orders still on German soil to stay and for the reinstatement of Articles 15, 16, and 18 of the Reich Constitution, which protected civil rights of Catholics. Windthorst knew that Lasker and the Left Liberals would support the move and the Bishops and the Centre would form a solid phalanx behind such an unexceptionable bill. After all, how could a few convents and monasteries undermine Bismarck’s mighty Reich? And if Bismarck blocked such a modest and reasonable bill, the Roman Curia would drop its private negotiations and fall in behind the Centre Party. Windthorst played Bismarck’s game as quickly and flexibly as the Chancellor could. He had a marvellous facility for exploiting the weakness of the Church in theKulturkampf to embarrass Bismarck and encourage the Catholic faithful.

The approaching end of the Kulturkampf and the election of 1878 had ended Bismarck’s need for Liberal votes. Now he could introduce protection. On 12 November 1878 he proposed that the Bundesrat create a Tariff Commission to prepare new legislation. In December Bleichröder, who visited Friedrichsruh regularly, told Bismarck and Tiedemann that his English correspondents informed him that American competition had begun to have a serious effect on English monetary policy and that it was likely that the UK would also soon adopt tariffs. On 15 December the official press published the news that Bismarck had sent the text of a set of requirements for tariffs to the Bundesrat. Bismarck declared in the Reichstag that the Reich income should in future come from indirect taxes rather than direct ones. Tariffs would allow financial reform, since indirect taxes ‘were less burdensome than direct ones’ and since ‘other states surround themselves with customs barriers it seems to me justified … that German products have a small advantage over foreign ones.’⁵⁰ These two standard arguments for protection had become Bismarck’s policy even though as opposition papers quickly pointed out, Bismarck had in 1875 wanted most of the state’s income to come from ‘income tax from the really rich people’.⁵¹ The opposition stressed the fact that indirect taxes have a regressive effect, a penny on a loaf of bread costs the poor man a larger share of his income than the same penny on a loaf purchased by a rich man.

Bismarck was in fighting mood, as he told Tiedemann on 11 January 1879,

if his ideas on tax and tariff policy meet serious resistance among the Prussian ministers, he will travel to Berlin, call a meeting of the State Ministry and put to them the future of the cabinet. If the gentlemen will not go along with him, so he will ask them to look for other employment and will form a ministry with new cabinet officers from lower ranks if necessary. The Emperor agrees with him.⁵²

He also sent a draft bill to the Bundesrat to make sure that punishment of excesses in speeches in the Reichstag be introduced, the so-called Maulkorbgesetz (the muzzle law). The Prussian Landtag took up the issue and Lasker spoke for the majority when he said ‘freedom of speech is untouchable and must remain so and expressed the confidence that the Reichstag will know how to preserve it’.⁵³ Even Bismarck could not introduce restrictions on free speech in the Reichstag and the motion failed.

On 19 January Max von Forckenbeck (1821–92), president of the Reichstag, wrote to Franz Freiherr Schenk von Stauffenberg (1834–1901), the leader of the Bavarian Liberals about his anxieties. Forckenbeck and Stauffenberg were the two ministers whom Bennigsen had wanted to bring with him into Bismarck’s cabinet. Both were far too liberal for the Chancellor. Forckenbeck he called ‘dark red’.⁵⁴ Forckenbeck’s letter sums up the change that had been going on:

The Bismarck system is developing with fearsome speed just as I always feared. Universal military conscription, unlimited and excessive indirect taxes, a disciplined and degraded Reichstag, and a public opinion ruined and made powerless by the struggle between all material interests—that is certainly the politics of popular impotence, the end of any possible development towards constitutional freedom, and at the same time a terrible danger for the entire Reich and the new imperial monarchy. Is the National Liberal party a suitable instrument to combat such dangers with its present politics, its present programme and its present composition? Will we not be led deeper and deeper into the quagmire? Has pure opposition not become a duty?⁵⁵

Ludwig Bamberger took a cynical view of Bismarck’s motives in introducing tariffs and in a diary entry just dated 1879 he speculated that self-interest played a big role:

The progress of Bismarck’s thinking arrived at protective tariffs from the protection of agriculture. The industrial tariffs served as a mere pretext. Among agrarian tariffs the tariff on lumber came at the head of the list. He is, after all, proprietor of woods. Senator Plessing from Hamburg who substituted for Krüger in the Federal Council was astonished by the exuberance of Bismarck when it came to this subject. He took part personally in all the negotiations, was inexhaustible in his speeches, knew his way through the most minute details of the lumber trade like an office clerk. According to the Senator’s account, the axe rages in the woods of Lauenburg and huge piles of timber have piled up in the warehouse. … Bismarck asked his own advisers, those whom he trusts, to send the final draft of the tariff bill to Bad Kissingen where he made corrections in his own hand in the rates on the various categories of timber products.⁵⁶

Later in February he lost another of his old friends. On 27 February 1879 Albrecht von Roon died, age 76. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen assessed the man whom he had known well:

Roon was the perfect type of the severe, dutiful, conscientious, Prussian. He was endowed with very high intellectual abilities, great talent for organization, an unshakeable determination, strength of will. In manner, occasionally rash, off-putting but genuine through and through.⁵⁷

Roon had an inner integrity and decency which high office, fame, and success never spoiled or corrupted. Bismarck owed him a greater debt than to any other figure in his career. Roon’s persistence with the King from 1859 to 1862 secured Bismarck the chance to become Minister-President in the ‘Conflict Time’ and his loyalty through their relationship allowed Bismarck to become what he did. In bad health and very tired, Roon answered Bismarck’s call to become Minister-President of Prussia in 1872—to allow Bismarck to indulge himself in hysterical hypochondria. Here is Bismarck’s verdict.

Roon was the most competent of my colleagues. He could not get along with others. He treated them as a regiment which he marched too long. The colleagues in due course complained about this and I had to take over the Ministry of State again.⁵⁸

So much for the adieu to the most loyal and far-sighted of Bismarck’s companions.

On 7 February 1879 Bismarck announced that the government intended ‘to make it a goal to complete the system of state railways, which was outlined in the draft of 1876, as far as the main trunk lines are concerned’.⁵⁹ The retreat from private enterprise had become a rout. On 24 February 1879 the Congress of German Landowners, the pressure group of the 250 largest landowners, adopted protectionism.

There remained a problem about what to do with the customs receipts which would flow to the central authorities from the new tariffs. The German Reich was a federal state. When ministers addressed the Reichstag, they spoke in the name of ‘The Allied Governments’ not ‘the Reich’ let alone ‘Germany’. If the income from tariffs went exclusively to the federal government, the federal balance would tilt against the Allied Governments. The Roman Catholic Centre Party had its power base in Bavaria, the Catholic districts of Württemberg and Baden, and the Catholic Rhineland, areas very unwilling to see the Prussian-dominated Reich grow. When the Reichstag opened on 12 February it became increasingly clear that the Centre with its 94 votes could give Bismarck his majority or withhold it.

The immediate result was that Bismarck had to learn to be nice to Windthorst. On 31 March he had a conversation with Windthorst and granted a pension to the Dowager Queen of Hanover, a convenient gesture since Windthorst, as a lawyer, represented the exiled Hanoverian royal family.⁶⁰ Bismarck then told him that he had proposed diplomatic recognition of the Curia in exchange for maintenance of the Anzeigepflicht, the obligation of the Vatican to get the approval from the state for the appointment of bishops. Windthorst replied that he and his friends had ‘received no communication at all from the curia over the content of the negotiations, and were therefore not in a position to express a view of them’. Bismarck and Windthorst agreed on the need for tariffs.⁶¹

In the midst of these complicated negotiations, on 8 April 1879, the French ambassador, Saint-Vallier, wrote to the French Foreign Secretary Waddington about the reality of the power of parliament in Bismarck’s Reich:

it is a common enough error among newcomers and superficial observers here in Berlin to take for real the parliamentary system as it exists here: with more experience and reflection, one quickly realizes that Germany is endowed with a fine and beautiful façade, finely embellished on the surface, faithfully representing a picture of a parliamentary and constitutional system; the rules are correctly applied; the play of parties, turmoil in the corridors, lively debates, stormy sessions, defeats inflicted on the government and even on the powerful Chancellor (only in matters of course that he considers of secondary importance), in short everything is done that can give the illusion and make one believe in the gravity of the debates and importance of the votes; but behind this scenery, at the back of the stage, intervening always at the decisive hour and always having their way, appear Emperor and Chancellor, supported by the vital forces of the nation—the army dedicated to the point of fanaticism, the bureaucracy disciplined by the master’s hand, the bench no less obedient, and the population, skeptical occasionally of their judgements, quick to criticize but quicker still to bow to the supreme will.⁶²

This view of Germany, the authoritarian state, finds easy assent but is too simple. Parliamentary government twisted and turned to free itself from Bismarck’s control. There was nothing inevitable about the longevity of King/Emperor William I. His death almost any time before 1887 would have ushered in the era of parliamentary sovereignty in Germany. The combination of the reactionary Emperor and the brilliance of Bismarck managed to prevent it but only just.

In April Windthorst travelled to Vienna to see his Hanoverian clients and while there had a meeting on 20 April 1879 with the nuncio Archbishop Ludovico Jacobini, who had been acting as the intermediary between Bismarck and the Vatican. Windthorst told the nuncio ‘Bismarck is more powerful than King William and the dynasty. No one is able to do anything against him. “A second Wallenstein,” the historian Klopp inserted eagerly. “More than that”, was Windthorst’s laconic reply.’⁶³

When Windthorst returned to Berlin at the end of April 1879 he had a surprise awaiting him. For the first time Bismarck invited him on 3 May to a parliamentary soirée at 76 Wilhelmstrasse. Centre deputies had been rigorously excluded from such convivial occasions and the press gathered outside the palace to hear what happened. Bismarck received Windthorst with extra cordiality but spilled punch over his white waistcoat and tried—to the amusement of Windthorst and the bystanders—to dry him off with a tablecloth. It might, in view of Bismarck’s deep loathing for Windthorst, be considered a ‘Freudian slip’. When the tiny little man emerged on the steps, the journalists asked him how he had been received and he replied with his usual quick wit ‘extra Centrum nulla salus’ which for those less familiar with Catholic dogma may need a gloss.⁶⁴ In traditional Catholic doctrine, the church taught ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’—outside the church, no salvation. Windthorst’s pun played on the fact that Bismarck could accomplish nothing in the Reichstag without the Centre; there would be no ‘salvation without the Centre’. Canon Franz Christoph Ignaz Moufang (1817–90), an intransigent ultramontane and rigorous theological conservative,⁶⁵ was horrified at the spectacle of Windthorst and the Antichrist Bismarck in polite conversation:

the exiled and harassed bishops and the punished and harried priests, and the zealous Catholics who listen and read in the newspapers that Herr Bismarck and Herr Windthorst have met together very amiably, do not understand how one is able to be a persecutor of the Church and a friend of Herr Windthorst at one and the same time.⁶⁶

Apparently the pious Canon had not heard that to eat with the devil one needs a long spoon.

On 9 May 1879 Eduard Lasker accused Bismarck in the Reichstag of pursuing ‘the finance policy of the propertied’. Bismarck replied in a rage,

I can say with just as much justice that the Herr Deputy Lasker pursues the finance policy of the property-less. He belongs among those gentlemen, who at all stages in the promulgation of our legislation form the majority of whom scripture says ‘they sew not, the harvest not, they spin not, they weave not, and still are clothed.’⁶⁷

The real quote reads very differently. It is from the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 6, verse 26: ‘Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?’ Bismarck continued by personal attacks on Lasker so sharp that the president of the Reichstag rang the bell to warn the Chancellor to use parliamentary language. Bismarck in a rage (wütend) created an ‘embarrassing scene’:

what’s the meaning of that bell? It’s perfectly quiet in the house … I am the highest official in the Reich, and am here as President of the Bundesrat. I am not subject to the discipline of the president. He may not interrupt me nor warn me with the bell, as he did today. At the end he may criticize my speech or those of the members of the Bundesrat. He may even complain to their superiors, but if he tries to exercise discipline in this way, it will be one step closer to a dissolution.⁶⁸

The heated debates continued. Over 155 speakers took part in the debates in the Reichstag alone, let alone in the committees. The special interests swarmed round the chamber pressing for protection for this or that product, haggling over rates and conditions. One condition became essential and the Centre took it to the floor, proposed by its parliamentary leader, Georg Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein (1825–90). Franckenstein chaired the committee which drafted the legislation for protective tariffs, and included a clause, which came to be called the ‘Franckenstein clause’, which limited the amount of customs revenue and tobacco duty payable to the Reich to 130 million marks. Everything beyond that would go to the federal states. On 9 July 1879 the Franckenstein clause was adopted by 211 (Conservatives, Free Conservatives, Centre) and 122 against (National Liberals, Progressives, Poles, Guelphs, and SPD).⁶⁹ It had long-term and important effects. By limiting the Reich to a fixed amount of customs revenue, the Centre and theFranckenstein clause prevented the central government from profiting from the great economic boom and the staggering growth in imports after the end of the great depression in 1896. Niall Ferguson argues that the squeeze on the budget in the years before 1914 made the General Staff and the War Ministry so nervous about Russian and French growth in military strength that they resolved to act in July 1914 before Germany with its constant budget crises was overrun by them.⁷⁰ Another example of Burke’s principle of unintended consequences.

On 26 May 1879 the Reichstag completed the committee stage of its debates on the tariff and on 25 June 1879 Bismarck accepted the Franckenstein Clause as the precondition of passage of the tariff bill. On 9 July Bismarck gave his last speech to the Reichstag on tariffs: ‘Since becoming a minister, I have belonged to no party; nor could I have belonged to any. I have been successively hated by all parties and loved by few. The roles have continually changed.’⁷¹ Windthorst replied for the Centre: ‘What we are doing, we do on grounds inherent in the matter itself, and for no other reason.’ To the charge that Bismarck had duped him into support for the bill, ‘In any case, I want to say to you that whoever wants to dupe me must get up a little bit early.’ (Universal, stormy laughter.)⁷² On 12 July 1879 the protective tariff bill passed with a majority of 100.

The next stage was to get rid of superfluous ministers. On 29 July 1879 Adalbert Falk resigned and was replaced by the arch-conservative Robert Freiherr von Puttkamer, a member of one of the largest and most influential Pomeranian Junker families and a relative of Bismarck’s wife. By 1880 fifteen Puttkamers had the rank of general in the Prussian Army, and another 250 officers of various ranks, even more than the Kleists.⁷³ Robert Puttkamer had a very large and handsome full beard. Bismarck later said, ‘Had I known that he spent half an hour every day combing his beard, I would never have made him a minister.’⁷⁴ Puttkamer loved to hear the sound of his own voice, to which Bismarck remarked, ‘He is an excellent swimmer; too bad, he swims in every puddle.’⁷⁵

The dismissal of Karl Rudolf Friedenthal was much nastier. Friedenthal was one of the founders of the Bismarckian Reich Party in 1867 and became Minister of Agriculture on 19 April 1874.⁷⁶ In 1874 and for some years afterwards Bismarck had been delighted with Friedenthal because as an estate owner he lived as Bismarck did in the real world. By the summer of 1879 he wanted to be rid of all the remaining Liberal members of his cabinet. On 3 June 1879 he wrote to the Kaiser, who had a high opinion of Friedenthal in his usual dismissive way about the ministers in the Prussian State Ministry:

He (Friedenthal) is ambitious and his wife perhaps even more so, but his ambition rests on the future. He keeps in touch with a tiny group of ‘future ministers’, who reckon with their expectation that when God calls His Royal Highness to the throne, he will name a liberal ministry. Among the five or six minister candidates who make this calculation, Friedenthal is by far the cleverest.⁷⁷

At a parliamentary soirée toward the end of June, Bismarck called Friedenthal, who was a Lutheran convert married to a Catholic, a ‘jüdischen Hosenscheisser’ (a Jew who shits his trousers, i.e. a coward) and this got to Friedenthal. On 4 July Lucius went to see Friedenthal and recorded what Friedenthal said to him. He was:

Not willing to be trodden under foot. Under no circumstances would he allow himself to be talked into staying. He was now packing and prepared to be expelled from the country etc. The grounds of his anger are remarks of Bismarck at the last soirée at which he called Friedenthal ‘a semitic pantsshitter [Hosensch——] which with certain circumlocutions got into all the newspapers.⁷⁸

Bismarck appointed the loyal Lucius to be Friedenthal’s successor and on 14 July Lucius received important post, the large blue envelope from the palace with his appointment to the ministry of agriculture and forestry.

I went to Friedenthal at once and found him in great distress. He had heard nothing and apparently feared that he would receive his dismissal in an ungracious form. While I was there, two blue envelopes were delivered, in one he found confirmation of his resignation but with the rank and title of Minister of State; the other contained a patent of nobility. He gave me the impression that the latter was unwelcome to him. Later he refused the ennoblement.⁷⁹

Friedenthal’s treatment at Bismarck’s hands shows again his inability to recognize service given him by others. Hans-Joachim Schoeps, who spent his career as a Jewish apologist for the Prussians,⁸⁰ claims that Bismarck called him a ‘jüdischen Hosenscheisser’ because Friendenthal refused to become Minister of the Interior, for which nobody else offers any evidence. But even if the story had been true, what gentleman insults a valued colleague in that vulgar and disgusting way? Friedenthal’s real crime lay in the fact that he had the nerve to resign at a time of his choosing, not Bismarck’s.

Liberals had been expelled from the cabinet. Draconian laws against the Social Democratic Party now violated the civil and political rights of tens of thousands of citizens. Tariffs and customs duties had replaced free trade. Schemes for state ownership had multiplied but it never occurred to Bismarck to resign or explain the great changes. He had no need to do so. He was Bismarck. Quite the contrary. He wanted to revenge himself on the Liberals as is clear from the letter he wrote to King Ludwig of Bavaria on 4 August 1879:

The fiery speeches addressed to the property-less classes by Lasker and Richter have displayed the revolutionary tendencies of these deputies so clearly and nakedly that for a supporter of the monarchical form of government no political cooperation with them can be possible anymore … These are learned gentlemen without property, without industry, without a trade. These gentlemen are the ones who deliver the revolutionary ferment and who lead the Progressive National Liberal parliamentary parties. Splitting these fractions is in my most humble opinion an essential task of conservative politics.⁸¹

The Liberals merely wanted the standard protections of the rule of law, freedom of speech, protection against arbitrary arrest, freedom of religious worship, freedom of the press, and freedom of learning and research, all freedoms enshrined in the Prussian Constitution of 1850 and ruthlessly ignored by Bismarck, who had not included them in the Reich Constitution of 1870. Such persons had in his eyes become guilty of revolutionary tendencies, not against the ‘monarchical principle’ but against the tyranny of Otto von Bismarck.

In August 1879 Tsar Alexander II complained about German policy to Ambassador von Schweinitz and on 15 August wrote to the Kaiser to complain in even stronger terms. Bismarck reacted by moving toward Austria and arranged to meet the Austrian Foreign Minister, Gyula Count von Andrassy (1823–90) at Bad Gastein on 27 and 28 August. The official press noted that ‘confidential discussions’ had taken place but made no further comment.⁸² Andrassy represented the Westerners at the Habsburg court, a grand Hungarian magnate who had fought with Kossuth for a liberal, independent Hungary, had fled to England, which he admired, and had been an architect of the Dual Monarchy in 1867, the system under which the Hungarian Kingdom had equal status with the Austrian lands. As his biographer writes, Andrassy sought Rückendeckung (cover for his back) in Berlin⁸³ and a glance at the structure of European politics shows why. The Magyars ruled over some 17 million people (Magyars, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians) but never constituted a majority of the total population in the ‘Kingdom of Hungary’, as it was resurrected in 1867. They had to defend their rights both against the Austrians, especially those Austrians who favoured greater rights for the Slavic peoples of the Monarchy, and against the Slavic peoples themselves inside and outside the frontiers. Hence the Magyars of Andrassy’s persuasion looked to Berlin to counter those forces. Dualism had made Hungary a Great Power and Andrassy intended to keep it that way. An Austro-German alliance would secure that support.

Bismarck had come to recognize that an Austrian alliance would serve German security, as he wrote after the Austro-German Alliance was signed on 7 October 1879:

I have succeeded in carrying out what I would like to call the first stage of my security policy by erecting a barrier between Austria and the western powers. In spite of the summer clouds, which in my view will blow away, I do not doubt that I can reach the second stage, that is, the restoration of the Three Emperors’ League, the only system which in my view secures the greatest prospect of European peace.⁸⁴

Trouble arose when William I refused categorically to see things that way. He loved his nephew, Tsar Alexander II, the son of his favourite sister, Charlotte. He had grown up in the Napoleonic Era when the Russian Empire had destroyed Napoleon, liberated Prussia, and guaranteed the domination of genuine conservative values. On 31 August Bismarck saw the Emperor, who flatly refused to allow him to go to Vienna, and, as Bismarck wrote to von Bülow, ‘My nerves were most affected by William’s prohibition against my going to Vienna.’⁸⁵ The usual psycho-drama unfolded. Bismarck always collapsed when the Kaiser disapproved or scolded him. These collapses had very real somatic consequences and he suffered sleeplessness, rage, severe indigestion, neuralgia, and facial pains. He wrote to Radowitz that ‘I have not recovered from the consequences for my health of similar frictions that occurred at Nikolsburg and Versailles; today my health is so diminished that I cannot think of attempting to do business under such circumstances.⁸⁶

But, as always, he did. On 3 September, the Kaiser visited the Tsar at his hunting lodge at Alexandrovo in Russian Poland to resolve differences, while Bismarck continued to negotiate the terms of an alliance with Austria. Again, very typically, he played another option to keep his combinations flexible. On 16 September 1879 he authorized Count Münster, the German ambassador to Britain, to ask Disraeli about the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance. The sources suggest that Münster never reported sufficiently clearly Disraeli’s positive response and as a result Bismarck noted on the margins ‘sonst nichts?’ (is that all?). He gave up on the British option, which he may not have taken seriously in any case.⁸⁷

In spite of the Emperor’s reservations, Bismarck went to Vienna, where he received the treatment reserved for modern superstars. He was mobbed at railway stations, huge and cheering crowds gathered along his carriage routes in Vienna. Over the two days, 23 and 24 September 1879, Bismarck and Andrassy negotiated a treaty with very limited terms: if either treaty partner were attacked by Russia, that would trigger the casus foederis, which meant that it would have to intervene. If either power were attacked by another power, the other would maintain benevolent neutrality unless Russia joined the attacker. If that case arose, then the other partner would have to fight. The provisions so designed ensured that Austria would not get involved in a second Franco-German war for the defence of Alsace-Lorraine. Bismarck wanted more and Andrassy refused to yield it. At one point, Bismarck lost his temper and he leaned his great bulk over the Austrian and said with menace ‘either accept my proposal or …’. Andrassy remained silent, and Bismarck laughed as he finished the sentence, ‘otherwise I will have to accept yours.’⁸⁸ The official Provincial Correspondence recorded the highly laudatory articles in the Vienna papers and the warm welcome the press had given to the new Austro-German entente.⁸⁹

On 25 September Bismarck returned to Berlin and had an extremely difficult audience with the Emperor. After a long emotional conversation, the Emperor gave in and remarked afterwards that ‘Bismarck is more necessary than I am.’⁹⁰ On 29 September Bismarck addressed the Prussian cabinet for two and a half hours on the Austrian treaty and Robert Lucius von Ballhausen, now Minister of Agriculture, heard Bismarck in full flow, the experience that Stosch in 1873 had described as an ‘enchantment’. Lucius wrote that Bismarck had held the cabinet ‘absolutely enthralled … All the ministers support the Austro-German dual alliance as a recreation of the old German Confederation in a new more modern form.’⁹¹ On 5 October Bismarck held another cabinet meeting before which Lucius heard Bismarck read out his resignation request which he had prepared if the Emperor had not given in on the treaty with Austria. ‘His Majesty had in the meantime written him all sorts of soothing remarks … they had never had any serious differences in the seventeen years of joint work and joint achievement. Bismarck laughed out loud about this comfortable memory. Now once again peace has been restored.’⁹² On Tuesday 9 October he left for an extended stay in Varzin.⁹³ The Austro-German Treaty, signed on 7 October, remained secret.

While Bismarck walked the woods at Varzin, another crisis broke out, this time a wave of public anti-Semitism, which completed the end of the liberal era and began another stage in Germany history that ended in the Holocaust. Bismarck played a vital role in the process and he welcomed it. He shared, as we have seen, the visceral hatred of Jews among the Prussian Junkers, though he made exceptions for a few Jews such as Lassalle or, for a while, Friedenthal, Friedberg, and Bamberger. In 1811 Ludwig von der Marwitz attacked the Prussian reform movement and its liberal aims because they would end in a Judenstaat. No Junker dissented from that view and Bismarck shared it. His Pietist friends shared it because Jews could have no place in a Christian state but, as Bismarck abandoned the Christian state in the name of the secular state, he retained the unspoken belief, still widely and equally unconsciously held in today’s Germany, that ein Jude cannot be a German. In 1850, in an essay called ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (untranslatable but roughly ‘Jewishness in Music’) Richard Wagner gave that view a new sharpness by arguing—even before Darwin—that Jews by race could not express true German art; they could not be more than parasites on authentic German creativity. Wagner also saw ‘the Jew’, as von der Marwitz and Bismarck did, as the embodiment of commercial life. Wagner declared:

According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.⁹⁴

According to Wagner, ‘the Jew’ (always in the abstract) corrupts art by turning it into a market for ‘art commodities’ (Kunstwarenwechsel). This theme, repeated ad nauseam, reflects the romantic distaste for the fact that even a genius has to sell tickets. Wagner’s radical anti-capitalism was directed at Jews and the key figure, of course, was Nathan Meyer Rothschild and his brothers:

in this respect we have rather had to regret that Herr v. Rothschild was too keen-witted to make himself King of the Jews, preferring, as is well known, to remain ‘the Jew of the Kings.’⁹⁵

In Wagner’s view, ‘The Jew’ corrupted morals and culture by money. The message would be transformed into racial terms in the arguments used by the Nazis. The connection is there, however often Wagnerians try to deny it. ‘The Jew’ corrupted pure speech. Jews were unable to speak German properly. The word mauscheln is a German verb which is defined as ‘mumble’ in modern, politically correct, German dictionaries, but the real definition is ‘to speak like a Jew, sound like Yiddish’. Wagner here too was a pioneer:

But far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech; and this is the essential point at which to sound the Jewish influence upon Music. The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien … The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew’s production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation’s tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber (eines unerträglich verwirrten Geplappers); so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

When Wagner invented modern anti-Semitism in 1850, he had to conceal his identity by writing anonymously. When he republished the essay in 1869, he could use his own name, because the attitudes he pioneered had become widely held.

Wagner was the first prophet of modern anti-Semitism, because his gigantic artistic achievement, like Nietzsche’s philosophy, rejected reason, free markets, private property, capitalism, commerce, and social mobility, just those very attributes of the modern world that Bismarck and the Junker class loathed. They were joined by the very large artisan class, which had never accepted free markets and free entry into the trades called Gewerbefreiheit. This restrictive attitude to trades and crafts and who may practise such enterprises continues to the present in the defensive attitudes of the German Handwerkerstand. The origins of this powerful craft-guild mentality come from the fact that Germany—uniquely in Europe—had disintegrated into thousands of little political authorities, whose princes and senators lacked the power to suppress guilds and corporations. When the French Revolution cleared away the mini-states of the old Reich, and abolished all closed corporations, it left a legacy of dissatisfaction and rage among the artisans at their lost privileges which never died away. Anti-Semitism was thus endemic in large sectors of the German Protestant population and in Catholic regions it belonged to Catholic doctrine until the Second Vatican Council and the papacy of John Paul II.

The most important novel of society of the nineteenth century spread the picture of the repulsive Jew beyond the circles of those who read music journals. In 1855 Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit) appeared and became one of the best-selling novels of the period. The book sang the virtues of the new German mercantile class. Its hero Anton Wohlfahrt (the name means ‘welfare’), the honest and worthy young man from humble beginnings, rises to wealth and prestige in the new commercial world because of his bourgeois virtues. The anti-hero is the Polish Jew from Ostrau, Veitel Itzig, who begins his career at the same time. Itzig has every vice in contrast to Anton’s virtues; he is vulgar, servile, and sly, where Anton is upright, correct, and honest.

He [Itzig] understood what always counted as the highest in this society, how to give his obsequious humility a touch of farce, and was a master of the absolutely most tasteless bows and scrapes. He had the science to turn old brass into silver gilt and old silver to high polish. He was always ready to buy worn-out jackets—which passed among the initiate for the highest cunning.⁹⁶

The book, a huge six-volume work, paints Jews and the Jewish community in such loathsome and lurid vignettes that it could pass for Nazi propaganda. There is, however, hope, the son of Itzig’s boss, Herr Ehrental (again a sly joke—valley of honour), Bernhard Ehrental has become assimilated and German. Freytag sketches him as a positive and sympathetic character, the ‘reform Jew’.

For some observers, the Germanized Jews were worse than the Veitel Itzigs, because at least the Polish Jews stood out. In 1865, one of the main newspapers of the Protestant church could write this about reform Jews:

The true reform Jew is a thoroughly specific and peculiar being of a particular smell and taste. Even among the rodents which gobble and slobber everything and leave traces of their gluttony, there is a variation in the degrees of their repulsiveness. The mouse with its gnawing tooth is not as odious as the caterpillar with its soft, cold body and countless legs, or the snail which leaves behind its thick slime and always arouses disgust. Both are sometimes at large and eat up everything which is green, so that nothing remains but the bare stalks. Similarly, the reform Jews gnaw away at everything which is still green in human life, at everything which warms the soul, which is beautiful, which is lofty and lovely, and, if it were up to them, nothing would be left over but bones and brushwood.⁹⁷

The Nazis could not better this piece of Protestant hate literature.

Jews had become prominent in the industrial and commercial boom economy of the Gründerzeit. Fritz Stern gives some numbers for the concentration of Jews in certain professions and activities. In 1881 the Jews of Berlin represented 4.8 per cent of the population but 8.6 per cent of writers and journalists, 25.8 per cent of those engaged in the money market and 46 per cent of its wholesalers, retailers, and shippers. In 1871 43 per cent of the residents of Hamburg earned less than 804 marks but only 3.4 per cent of the Jewish population belonged to this group. Ten per cent of all students enrolled in Prussian universities and even higher in the gymnasia were Jewish.⁹⁸ Peter Pulzer points to other areas where Jews were very strongly over-represented. In 1887 in Prussia Jewish lawyers made up 20.4 per cent of the profession, Catholics with thirty times the population had only 26.3 per cent.⁹⁹ Jews stood for liberalism. Pulzer has assembled the party affiliations of all Jewish members of the Reichstag between 1867 and 1878. The total amounted to twenty-two, of whom six were baptized Jews like Karl Rudolf Friedenthal, Bismarck’s Minister of Agriculture. Of these, only one was a conservative, two were members of Bismarck’s Reich Party, the rest were liberals of one kind or other.

Jews in politics, the law, the universities, and journalism gave offence to those who cared but Jews in banking and finance greatly worsened the situation. W. E. Mosse in his pioneering study Jews in the German Economy shows how influential Jews were in this area. Jews dominated private banking in the 1850s and 1860. ‘With the doubtful exception of Gebr. Schickler, there are no Gentile houses to compare with [them].’

Mosse supplies a list of the major German cities and the bankers in them:

Berlin: Mendelssohn & Co., S. Bleichröder, F. Mart. Magnus, Robert Warschauer, and H. C. Plaut;

Frankfurt: M. A. von Rothschild, Erlangers, Speyers, Wertheimers, Goldschmidts;

Mannheim: W. H. Ladenburg & Söhne and Hohenemser;

Cologne: Sal. Oppenheim;

Hamburg: Heines, Behrens, Warburgs;

Breslau: Heimanns;

Dresden: Kaskels;

Mainz: Bambergers;

Munich: Hirsches, Seligmanns, Kaullases, and Wassermans.¹⁰⁰

The super-rich had a disproportionate share of Jewish millionaires. Prussia has to serve as surrogate for Germany as a whole because it had income tax whereas the Reich as such had none. The tax returns for 1908 show that ‘of the 29 families with aggregate fortunes of 50 or more million marks, 9 (31 percent) were Jewish or of Jewish origins.’¹⁰¹ Of the six names at the top of the table two were Jews.

Benjamin Disraeli, who cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, gives us a vivid description of a visit to one of the super-rich in 1878, Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichröder, whose mansion he visited during the Congress of Berlin:

The great banker of Berlin is Mr Bleichröder. He was originally Rothschild’s agent, but the Prussian wars offered him so great opportunities that he now almost seems to rival his former master. He has built himself a real palace, and his magnificent banqueting hall permitted him to invite the whole of the Plenipotentiaries and Secretaries of Embassy and the chief ministers of the Empire. All these last were present except P. Bismarck, who never appears, except occasionally at a Royal table. Mr Bleichröder, however, is Prince B’s intimate, attends him every morning and, according to his own account, is the only individual who dares to speak the truth to his Highness. The banqueting hall, very vast and very lofty, and indeed the whole of the mansion, is built of every species of rare marble, and, where it is not marble, it is gold. There was a gallery for the musicians, who played Wagner and Wagner only, which I was very glad of, as I have rarely had an opportunity of hearing that master. After dinner we were promenaded thro’ the splendid saloons and picture galleries, and a ballroom fit for a fairy tale, and sitting alone on a sofa was a very mean-looking little woman, covered with pearls and diamonds, who was Madame Bleichröder and whom he had married very early in life, when he was penniless. She was unlike her husband, and by no means equal to her wondrous fortune.¹⁰²

This kind of extravagance gives rise to ill feeling in any society but the public rarely worry about it until things begin to go wrong. After the crash on the Vienna stock exchange things went very wrong indeed. August Sartorius von Watershausen, whose massive study of the German economy in the nineteenth century still commands respect, gives us startling figures of the ferocity of the collapse and the length of the first phase of the crash. In 1872 the 444 largest listed companies had a nominal worth of 1,209 billion marks. By 1879, they had fallen to 400 billion. Industrial prices plummeted between 1873 and 1877. In marks per ton Westphalian iron fell from 120 to 42, steel rails and Bessemer steel from 366 to 128, and iron bars from 270 to 122.¹⁰³ Sartorius calls 1879 the ‘deepest point’ in the depression era. This necessarily led to a struggle for survival in heavy industry where the massive scale of capital investment needed for an iron foundry or Bessemer steel plant meant that heavy fixed costs had to be assumed before a bar or ton was sold. These fixed costs weighed even more heavily when prices fell and competition pushed them lower. Heavy fixed costs forced really big enterprises to try to combine to cut ruinous competition, and cut the one marginal cost which can be shed: labour. The second half of the Great Depression shows this clearly. Between 1882 and 1895, the number of large companies (those employing 51 or more persons) rose from 9,974 to 19,953 and in employment terms 1.61 million to 3.04 million and of those companies with more than 1,000 workers, the number doubled from 127 to 255, and employment rose from 213,160 to 448,731.¹⁰⁴

Hans Rosenberg’s classic work Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit of 1967 explored the interaction of economic change and what we would now call mentalité. He noticed a fundamental change in the nature of anti-Semitism:

In the course of the trend period 1873 to 1896 a revolutionary change took place in the character, intensity and function of anti-Semitism … in numerical growth, in qualitative restructuring and social location of economic anti-Semitism, in the rise of racial anti-Semitism and in the emergence of political anti-Semitism … Thus the trend period of the Great Depression was the great foundation stage and the first epochal peak of modern anti-Semitism. There followed a decline during the very satisfying high industrialization era between 1896 and 1914.¹⁰⁵

This can be seen in the emergence of a new kind of journalistic exposé—the financial scandal articles and books in which Jews are the villains. In 1874 the Gartenlaube, a popular middle-class weekly, published the first of this new genre of literature, the anti-Semitic article. It was called Der Börsenund Gründungsschwindel in Berlin (The Stock Exchange and Foundation Swindle in Berlin) and was written by Otto Glagau (1834–92). It began with the familiar complaint, ‘Speculation and swindle are the two powers which today sit on the throne of the world, under which civilized humanity sighs and groans, weakens and fails.’ Economists, Glagau writes, call boom and bust ‘a necessary evil’ but much of it is the work of crooks and fraudsters. The shining comet of these is ‘Dr Bethel Henry Strousberg, a son of the Chosen People from Polish East Prussia, where fox and wolf say “good night” to each other.’¹⁰⁶ Glagau, who wrote vivid prose, outlined the collapse of the Strousberg Romanian railway company which had been launched in 1868 by a 65 million thaler loan with a 7½ per cent rate of interest by a consortium headed by Strousberg, the Duke of Ratibor, the Duke of Ujest, and Count Lehndorff and when the railroad collapsed could be bought for under 40. Glagau compared Strousberg to an anti-Hercules, ‘Strousberg, the semite, filled the Augean stable with rubbish and depravity’.¹⁰⁷ Glagau continued the story with other articles and eventually published a book of his journalism two years later. Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) invented the word ‘Anti-Semitism’ in his pamphlet Der Sieg des Judentums über das Deutschtum written in 1878 and published in 1879.¹⁰⁸

On 17 March 1879 Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to Franz Overbeck, an Evangelical Theologian and academic colleague, to let out his exasperation with the Jews:

Sometimes it presses deeply on my soul to see how the character of our Folk has been ruined by the Jewish press. Is there a single name—with the exception of Moltke—which Semitic impudence has not spat upon and soiled?¹⁰⁹

On 15 November Heinrich von Treitschke, a Bismarck admirer and editor of the influential Preussische Jahrbücher, published an article under the title ‘Unsere Ansichten’ (Our Opinions) in which he attacked the Jews for their role in German public life and for the part they played in the economic collapse after 1873.¹¹⁰ As the historian Theodor Mommsen said of the article, ‘what he said was thereby made respectable.’¹¹¹ And he was the incomparable Treitschke, the most famous, the most successful, the most popular historian of his age, a respected member of the Reichstag, a popular poet and critic and the editor of the most important intellectual and political monthly journal in the German language. Treitschke represented the Liberal intellectual establishment and his attack on the Jews transformed the debate.

‘Unsere Ansichten’ is a long editorial. It begins with Treitschke’s views of foreign affairs, the Austrian alliance, relations with Russia, the instability in the Balkans, and the liberal defeats in the recent Prussian elections. Finally after ten pages, Treitschke claims to have discovered ‘a wonderful, mighty excitement in the depths of our people’s life’ of which ‘one of the symptoms of the deep change of mood is the passionate movement against the Judenthum [Jewry—JS]’. Treitschke is, after all, no Glagau nor Marr, no Grub Street gutter scribbler but a grand figure, a civilized man, a historian, so he has to be even-handed. He admits that Spanish Portuguese Jews have in England and France caused no trouble but Germany has to do with the Polish Jews, whose behaviour, he admits, has historic causes. The Jews should become Germans but, inconsistently he attacks not just the new immigrants but the cultivated German-speakers. For Treitschke ‘the most dangerous aspect is the unfair preponderance of Jews in the Press … For ten long years public opinion was “made” in many cities by Jewish pens. It was a disaster for the Liberal Party that its press gave the Judenthum too great a freedom to act.’ Of course, the Germans owe the clever Jews a great deal but they introduced a cynical, witty style which lacked ‘respect’ and contributed to the degradation of morals in society. Their jokes and slanders about religion were ‘simply shameless’. As a result, what has happened may be ‘brutal and ugly but is a natural reaction of the Germanic folk feeling against an alien element which has taken up too much space in our public life’.¹¹²

Anti-Semitism had now reached the heights of the establishment and soon would reach the court and highest aristocracy as the Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker began to preach sermons against Jews and Jewish influence. One of his disciples was the young Prince William, later Kaiser William II, another was Alfred Count von Waldersee, who had by the 1870s intrigued his way into the succession to Moltke. The Court Preacher sowed dissension in the royal household and ultimately contributed to the fall of Bismarck.

In the German-Jewish community the effect of all this was devastating. Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) may have been even better known than Treitschke and certainly outside Germany much more so. He came from an orthodox Jewish family and would have been a rabbi, had he not been arrested for revolutionary activities. He became a journalist and unsuccessful novelist. Between 1843 and 1858 he published four volumes of ‘Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten’ (Village stories from the Black Forest) which became an ‘incomparable world success, which made Auerbach together with Gustav Freytag the most popular German story-teller of the nineteenth century’. The stories went into many editions and into translation in every European language.¹¹³ This patriotic, national writer happened to be Jewish; suddenly in his late sixties he found that it mattered. In November, a week before Treitschke’s article, Auerbach wrote to his brother Jacob:

Lasker has not even been nominated as a candidate in Breslau. The inflammatory campaign against Jews has been at work here too. Yesterday in the local ‘Observer’, there was a piece from a Breslau newspaper, that Jews live in houses they have not built, etc. That is incitement to murder and theft, and we must now experience that.¹¹⁴

Bismarck said nothing throughout the whole crisis. It suited him that anti-Semitism undermined his enemies like Lasker. Windthorst said again and again that one must condemn anti-Semitism. In a speech in the Reichstag on 16 April Windthorst declared that he demanded equal rights and equal protection for all. ‘I will on every occasion represent the rights I claim for the Catholic Church and her servants for Protestants also and not least for Jews. I want this right for all.’¹¹⁵

The Jews under this mounting attack tried two strategies. On 18 June 1880 Bleichröder wrote to William I personally:

I dare call for Your Majesty’s high patriarchal protection for myself, but not only for myself, rather for a whole class of loyal subjects of Your Majesty who surely are not useless citizens of the state. The bitter struggle against Jews [is] a social struggle against property as such … My name is now on the tip of every Christian Social agitator’s tongue; it is invoked not only as a target for persecution but is branded as a prototype of all capital, of the stock market, of all prosperity, and of all evil … [this is] the beginning of the misfortune of a terrible social revolution.¹¹⁶

There was some truth in Bleichröder’s argument that anti-Semitism represented the revolt of the property-less against property but in a much larger sense it represented a revulsion of a deeply conservative society against liberalism. In the Catholic community, Carl Constantin Freiherr von Fechenbach saw in the anti-Semitic agitations a way to end the Kulturkampf by creating a union of conservative Catholic and Protestant groups in a Social Conservative Association dedicated to anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism, and state socialism which would include nationalization of basic industries.¹¹⁷ On 18 July 1880 he wrote to Adolf Franz, the editor of the main Catholic newspaper Germania, that he wanted to unify ‘all truly Christian elements on the basis of a common social programme’.¹¹⁸ Windthorst understood at once that Fechenbach represented a double threat to his leadership and programme. It diverted attention from the struggle to dismantle the May Laws and other Catholic disabilities and it moved the political attention from the Prussian and Reich parliaments where Windthorst’s mastery allowed him to run the Centre Party without formal office to outside organizations. Hence, when on 10 November Fechenbach invited Franckenstein and Windthorst to meet to discuss an anti-Semitic union of Catholics and Protestants; both declined.¹¹⁹ The Catholic lawyer August Reichensperger, like his brother Peter, a Centre deputy, relates in his memoirs that most Catholic parliamentarians were eager at that time to participate in the anti-Semitic campaign. So the threat was real.

On 20 November 1880 the Prussian House of Deputies debated the anti-Semitic agitation. In the name of the Progressive Party, Albert Haniel had asked the Minister of the Interior what position the Prussian government was preparing to take on the Anti-Semites’ Petition. August Reichensperger described it:

The most notable parliamentary event was the great debate on the Jewish question (die grosse Judendebatte) of November 20 and 22 [1880]. It was brought about by Haniel’s interpellation. Within the Catholic Centre group the discussion of the Jewish question had led to very agitated discussions between Windthorst, who was rather friendly toward the Jews, and the great majority of the group which was raring to join the attack. Windthorst stood almost completely alone in his opinion that the Catholic Centre should be as neutral as possible. … The debate before the House was a defeat for Jewry and the Progressive Party whose phrases turned always against them as Kulturkämpfer. The anti-semitic agitation has greatly increased since.¹²⁰

Berthold Auerbach who heard the debate despaired: ‘I have lived and worked in vain … the awareness of what lies concealed in German breasts and could explode at any time, cannot be eradicated.’¹²¹ Eça de Quieroz, a Portugese novelist in Berlin at the time, was appalled by the government’s response:

It leaves the Jewish colony unprotected to face the anger of the large German population—and washes its ministerial hands, as Pontius Pilate did. It does not even state that it will see the laws protecting the Jews, citizens of the Empire, are enforced; it merely has the vague intention, as vague as a morning cloud, of not altering them for the moment.¹²²

On 29 November 1880 Bamberger wrote to his sister-in law Henriette Belmont:

I shall write nothing about anti-Semitism. The newspapers are too full. The characteristic feature is that the ordinary people have nothing to do with it. It is the hatred and envy of the educated, professors, jurists, pastors and lieutenants, stimulated by the spirit of reaction and brutality from above.¹²³

In December Windthorst destroyed Fechenbach’s project by a brilliant parliamentary manoeuvre. He introduced a bill to exempt the administration of the sacraments from criminal prosecution. ‘This motion … forced the Conservative Party to choose between antagonizing Bismarck or exposing the vacuity of its own calls for confessional peace.’¹²⁴ The Conservatives voted against the bill and thus helped Windthorst destroy Fechenbach and the others who wanted to unite conservative Catholics and Protestant on social questions by showing that Protestants would never give Catholics an inch. He renewed it year after year and thus by restoring the Centre’s freedom of movement allowed it to make electoral alliances with the Progressives in the 1881 elections between the first and second ballot. It removed the possibility that Bismarck might imagine he would not have to pay in concessions on religious matters for the 100 Centre votes he used to pass his conservative tariff legislation.

On New Year’s Eve 1881 a group of men who had attended an anti-Semitic rally rioted, smashed Jewish shops, and shouted ‘Juden raus!’ (Jews out!).¹²⁵ On 12 January, when the Landtag reopened, Eugen Richter, a brilliant parliamentary Liberal debater, whom Bismarck hated as much as he hated ‘that dumb Jew Boy Lasker and his following, those theoretical speech-makers’,¹²⁶ connected Bismarck to the anti-Semitic agitation: ‘The movements begin to cling to the coat-tails of Prince Bismarck and, however much he rejects them and lets his press scold them for their excesses, they go right on cuddling up to him and call to him as noisy children surround their father.’¹²⁷ That is deeply true. The ‘Jew debate’ reflects a malevolent prejudice in Bismarck against the intelligentsia, against people like Lasker, who insisted on rights and protections against the state and against dictators like Bismarck. In November 1880 he wrote to his reactionary Minister of the Interior, Robert von Puttkamer, that ‘moneyed Jewry’ has ‘interests on balance inter-connected with the maintenance of the institutions of our state and whom we cannot do without’ but property-less Jewry ‘which … attaches itself to all political opposition’ must be crushed.¹²⁸

Bismarck destroyed German liberalism, his real enemy. If Jews got hurt, so be it. It was not his habitual but characteristic anti-Semitism that caused the damage but his intolerance of opposition. The legacy was so pervasive at the time and afterwards that one has not got to look hard to find its traces. One sees it in a letter from April 1881 from Theodor Fontane, the German novelist, to Philipp zu Eulenburg on Bismarck’s role:

Bismarck is a despot, but he has a right to be one, and he must be one. If he were not, if he were an ideal parliamentarian, who allowed his course to be determined by the most stupid thing there is, by parliamentary majorities, then we wouldn’t have a chancellor at all and least of all a German Reich. It is true on the other hand, of course, that under such a despot only dependent natures and powers of the second and third rank can serve, and that any free man will do well at times to resign. In doing that, the free man does right for him, but the chancellor also does what is right for him, when he doesn’t allow that to cause confusion in his action or inaction.¹²⁹

Consider what that means. Society in Germany could not achieve anything on its own because parliaments are ‘the most stupid things’, that is, we the people are unable through exercising their rights, to achieve anything. Germany needed to be governed by a genius-statesman who followed his own course. Fontane made a fundamental mistake in that analysis, the free man cannot do what is right for him, because his attitude—the surrender to the genius—shows that he has chosen slavery not freedom. The freedom to resign is not real freedom; that the subtlest social observer of the age fails to see that is Bismarck’s real gift to Hitler.

On Christmas Eve 1881 a truly free man, Eduard Lasker, wrote his political testament in a long letter to the novelist Berthold Auerbach, whose spirits had been deeply depressed by the events of the previous two years. Lasker, a bachelor, a Jew from an orthodox family in Jaroczyn, had risen to be spokesman of rights and liberty in Prussia and Reich by sheer ability. A trained lawyer, he devoted his entire life to a comprehensive and untiring preoccupation with the legislative process. In 1868 against Bismarck’s ponderous opposition, he pushed through legislation to protect free speech in the chambers of the Reichstag and in 1873 he exposed a case of ‘insider trading’ in railway shares carried out by Hermann Wagener, Bismarck’s friend and first editor of theKreuzzeitung, inside the Ministry of Trade. The ring included the Princes Putbus and Biron and enjoyed the tolerance of the Minister Count Itzenplitz. Lasker exposed them fearlessly, caused the resignations of all involved, and ensured the passage of a law making it illegal for civil servants to engage in commercial transactions connected with their office. He wrote the petition of December 1870 in which the North German Reichstag asked King William I to become Emperor and the first Reply to the Address from the Throne of the new German Reichstag in March 1871.¹³⁰ Only Windthorst surpassed him as a parliamentary speaker and legislator. On 25 December 1881 Lasker wrote to Berthold Auerbach and set out his understanding of the crisis in Germany about the Jews:

My dear, old friend, I have granted myself a festive pleasure in that I can settle down alone and composed on the first day of Christmas to write to you. … In the moment of danger many in the German Fatherland, among the best of them, have come to understand what you mean to us and expressions of sympathy and compassion from all sides, even from the enemy camp in public life, have been sent. Were these testimonies or even a part of them to come to you, you would no longer cling to the melancholy doubt that your impact on the nation has been ignored or in substance destroyed. After all, it is like a blue streak in the dark clouds that ugly anti-Semitism in a moral sense can be seen to be done for, by which I do not mean the end of the tension. For each revolutionary epoch takes on a confessional colouring and we stand in the middle of a violent revolution, perhaps the most violent I have experienced. But with regard to the particular anti-Semitic agitation the mud has settled and now lies on the ground … In the elections the people have definitely rejected anti-Semitism in its ghastly form and in its dirty content, as completely as could be wished. Not so easily will we be able to deal with the other element of the reactionary power. Bismarck is no enemy to underestimate even when he makes mistakes and acts in passion. In the present stage of society many too many problems exist, and when a powerful government looks around for popular programmes, then they can find effective levers, which after a lot of tapping about and getting lost, will not fail them. In fact it requires great vigilance, careful thought and the most selfless sacrifice to pull the good cause undamaged from the struggle. By good cause I mean the liberation of individuals and the reduction of situations when people see as dictated by fate what is really a situation the powerful seek to control.¹³¹

If Fontane missed the deeper meaning of his acceptance of the dictatorship of the genius-statesman in the name of the greater cause, Lasker greatly overestimated the power and civil courage of decent people. The Germans followed Fontane into slavery and not Lasker into freedom.

On 5 January 1884 Lasker died suddenly in New York after a long and successful speaking tour in the USA. Lucius summed up his view of Lasker in his diary on 6 January:

With him ends the one of the most significant and popular parliamentarians of the new Reich. Next to Bismarck and Bennigsen, he was the best known figure in the Reichstag. Thoroughly patriotic, unselfish, full of idealistic aspirations, he had a more destructive than constructive impact.¹³²

The US House of Representatives resolved that ‘this loss is not alone to be mourned by the people of his native land, where his firm and constant exposition of and devotion to free and liberal ideas have materially advanced the social, political and economic conditions of those peoples but also by lovers of liberty throughout the world.’¹³³ When the text of the resolution arrived in Berlin, Bismarck refused to accept the message and returned it to the senders because the description was erroneous. Five Prussian cabinet ministers desired to attend Lasker’s funeral and asked Bismarck for permission. He replied ‘most certainly not’.¹³⁴

On 28 January 1884 Lasker’s funeral took place in the famous Oranienburg Synagogue in Berlin, the very synagogue at whose dedication Bismarck had been present. Lasker’s parliamentary colleague, Ludwig Bamberger, recorded the event in his diary:

Today the funeral. No minister, no member of the Bundesrat, not one high civil servant, neither Friedberg nor Achenbach, not even the Swiss Minister Roth—apparently the ‘Ordre de Mouft’’. Kapp gave a mediocre speech. Tonight I talk in the Singakademie.¹³⁵

A month later, on 28 February, Bamberger reflected in telegraph style in his diary on the death of Lasker and the political implications: ‘the aftermath of Bismarck’s opposition to Washington confirms my view. Whether he will be proved right? The people is not born to be free.’¹³⁶ On 7 March the Reichstag had to be adjourned because of the angry debate when they protested at Bismarck’s discourtesy to their dead colleague and the US House of Representatives. On 13 March Bismarck appeared in the Reichstag at 1 p.m. and made a statement before the opening of formal business with regard to the message of condolence which the American House of Representatives had directed to the government. Bismarck attacked sharply revolutionaries and republicans. In response to an interjection by Hänel he responded wittily: ‘He had no obligation to exchange sentimentalities and in the political duel to let himself be shot down.’ He added his best wishes for the liberal party which Lasker had always led down the wrong path. ‘Solemn assertions of personal regard and friendship only make political opponents more dangerous.’¹³⁷ He described Lasker as somebody with ‘superior but destructive eloquence’.¹³⁸ He clearly enjoyed kicking a dead Jew and, when Hilga Spitzemberg called on him two days later, she found him in highest good spirits: ‘At 12 I found him at lunch, as fresh and cheerful as possible, after he had once again spoken the Reichstag, which they now call the “Gasthof zum toten Juden”—“The Guest House of the Dead Jew”.’ It might also be called Gasthof zum toten Liberalismus (the Guest House of Dead Liberalism) because Lasker’s death marked the end of the hope of a liberal regime in Germany.

In November 1881 Bismarck commented on the ‘Jew Debate’ at a cabinet meeting of the Prussian State Ministry:

With respect to the anti-Semitic movement he criticized it as inopportune. It had shifted its aims. He was only against the progressive not the conservative Jews and their press. He would always prefer the Socialists and Catholics to the progressives, the former aim at the impossible, which in the end must be smashed by the use of the sword; the progressives aim at a possible form of state: the republic.¹³⁹

On 26 November 1881 Bismarck told Lucius that ‘the “Jew Hunt” was not opportune. He had declared himself against it but had done nothing to stop it because of its courageous attack on the progressives.’¹⁴⁰ He had not declared himself against it: as usual, he lied about his acts.

During February and March 1880 Bismarck’s health deteriorated suddenly and dangerously. On 31 March 1880 Tiedemann found the Prince in really alarming condition:

At report, I found the Prince wretched, his tongue seemed to be lamed and his appearance horribly altered. He thinks he had a stroke last night, got no sleep, and threw up continually. Struck declared that it was nothing but a cold in the stomach with effects on the tongue. The Princess told me that her husband had eaten yesterday evening an endless mass of white wine punch ice cream and then six hard-boiled eggs. Evening council of war with the Princess, the Rantzau couple and me in the Princess’s boudoir about rules to be set for the morning. The Prince is more difficult than ever and shouted at Struck so furiously that the poor man fled, completely crushed. He had chicken soup, meat and vegetables for lunch, although Struck had quite specifically forbidden such food and equally categorically forbidden a walk in the rain in the garden. Now he sits alone in an irritable mood before the fireplace in the garden room and only wants his dogs for company.¹⁴¹

Bad health stirred Bismarck’s increasing irrationality and impossible rages. On 3 April 1880 the Bundesrat (the Federal Council) which Bismarck had designed to serve as his faithful legislative agency, met to consider the Reich Stamp Duty Law, not exactly the most exciting item on the parliamentary calendar. The Council began to consider its provisions, which the small states disliked, and small here includes tiny principalities like Reuss, elder Line (population 72,769 in 1910) and Reuss, younger Line (population 139,210), political units so little that they could not afford permanent ambassadors in Berlin and had to give proxies to larger neighbours. The small states particularly disliked the provision that placed stamp duty on postal transfers and on receipts given for advance payments into postal accounts. The vote on the issue produced a small sensation. The Federal Council rejected the provision by 30 votes to 28.¹⁴²

Bismarck flew into one of his increasingly intemperate rages. Tiedemann went to Friedrichsruh to discuss current business and arrived late on 4 April 1880. He was awakened early the next morning by a servant who told him that the Prince wished to see him at the unexpectedly early hour of 10 a.m. He found the Chancellor in a foul mood. He had again not slept and in his rage had risen to go to work at 9 a.m. By the time Tiedemann reported for duty, Bismarck was sitting at his desk, making notes from the Almanach de Gotha. He declared that the thirty states which had voted against the provision represented 7½ million to the 38 million behind the losers. Voting down Prussia by such a majority went directly against the spirit of the constitution, he declared, and such things must never happen again:

He ordered me to draw up a direct submission to the Kaiser in which he asked to be relieved of his office. Basic idea: he could neither represent the majority decision against Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony nor could he make use of his right to address the Reichstag which Article 9 of the Reich Constitution granted representatives of the Bundestag minority … Nor was that enough; in his furious impatience, the resignation request had to be sent to the Kaiser with the greatest possible haste, and by the evening edition of the official newspaper, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, formal notice of his resignation had to be published.¹⁴³

The combination of his terrible temper, gluttony, and hypochondria made him the ‘patient from Hell’. In this frame of mind he could do anything, including the absurd resignation over the stamp duty on postal transfers. He invited his neighbour and regular member of the inner circle at 76 Wilhelmstrasse, Carl Freiherr Hugo vom Spitzemberg, the Württemberg envoy to the Bundesrat, to ‘straighten the matter out’ and the conversation degenerated into a row as Hildegard recorded in her diary on 6 April 1880:

It would be laughable were it not so sad. The Prince is sick and nobody in his immediate circle calms him. On the contrary they stir him up, sometimes without realizing it, sometimes to ingratiate themselves, or out of fear. Of course he will not resign but the fact that everybody knows that makes it all into an unworthy threat—and on account of such a trivial matter. Carl was very angry and stood his ground against the Prince.¹⁴⁴

Nothing could dissuade him and a crisis, which Tiedemann accurately described as a ‘storm in a water glass’, blew up. The little states had an attack of nerves. Ambassadors scurried about. The Kaiser rejected Bismarck’s request and the non-official press assumed that it had been just another of Bismarck’s cunning ploys. It worked. On 12 April 1880 the Bundesrat reversed its decision and restored stamp duty on postal transfers and on receipts for pre-payment of bills at postal counters. The Reich had survived the crisis. But Bismarck had again given evidence of his growing emotional instability. Everything annoyed him. ‘The Prince visits the King of Saxony, very bitter that the King had not come to him.’¹⁴⁵ After all, what was a King of a smallish Kingdom to him? His servants and his ministers could not reason with him, and his unique power and prestige made him immune to any control other than that of the Emperor. He said no to everything that displeased him. The Prince had stopped riding and the press of business had grown. Friedrichsruh, unlike Varzin, could be quickly reached from Berlin and official visits filled the days. Nor had overeating ceased. As Tiedemann wrote in October 1880 to his wife,

I took a quick walk with Countess Marie [Rantzau, Bismarck’s daughter—JS] and prepared myself for the dinner, which in addition to dessert consists of six heavy courses. Nothing has changed. Here we eat until the walls burst.¹⁴⁶

And breakfast was no better:

we rise at 9 and breakfast at 10: roast beef or beef steak, cold venison, wild birds, roasted pudding, etc.¹⁴⁷

By early 1881 Bismarck’s erratic behaviour had begun to damage his projects in both the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag. Count Udo zu Stolberg-Wernigerode (1840–1910), the bluest of blue bloods, married to an Arnim-Boitzenburg and descended from Dönhoffs and related to the von der Schulenburgs, wrote to Tiedemann to complain about the ‘impossible situation’ which the German Conservative Party and his own Reich Party faced when ‘a man of the stature of the Reich Chancellor stands at the apex of business and his own party which is most willing to support him, is left completely in the dark about such questions’.¹⁴⁸

Tiedemann had begun to face his own ‘impossible situation’ and realized it could not continue. Bismarck literally worked him to the edge of exhaustion. In an age before the telephone, the typewriter, carbon paper, the xerox, and the fax, Tiedemann spent hours, indeed whole days, copying out dictation from the Chancellor, drafting letters and piece of legislation, transcribing notes of sessions and conversations. Luckily for the historian, Tiedemann had the sort of obsessive personality which led him, ‘as a conscientious statistician’, to count the number of pages he produced on busy days or the number of times he lunched with the Chancellor (133 in 1879).¹⁴⁹ Then there were the long residences in either Varzin and Friedrichsruh, weeks on end away from his wife and family, and the need to carry urgent documents or messages all over Berlin when on rare occasions Bismarck deigned to honour the capital with his presence. Bismarck’s hypochondria, sleeplessness, irregular hours, huge meals, terrible temper, rapid and alarming mood swings, had finally after six years taken their toll of the cheerful, flexible, and always available Tiedemann. He too had lost his capacity to sleep and never saw his children. His wife actually sent a formal invitation to the Bismarck house inviting the ‘HerrOberregierungsrat Tiedemann to tea at the family residence (dress morning coat) at 8 pm’. The gesture amused the Bismarcks but it sent Tiedemann a serious message. Finally, he knew that on a deeper level he could no longer survive closeness to Bismarck.

There is something great to live one’s life in and through a great man, to enter into and be absorbed by his thoughts, plans, decisions, in a certain sense to disappear in his personality. One’s own individuality runs the risk of being ground down. I yearned for freedom of movement, for independent activity, and for my own activity and creativity … When I asked him in Spring 1881 to recall his promise to arrange a suitable post, he flew into a rage and accused me in bitter, angry words, that all I thought about and worked for was designed to abandon him. It was the first and only time that he ever spoke to me in such a way. This scene too strengthened my resolve to leave the Reich Chancellery.¹⁵⁰

Bismarck could not imagine a better or more important job than one close to his person. What could be better than to serve Bismarck? Grudgingly Bismarck found Tiedemann a suitable post and bid him farewell.

He respected nobody and paid no attention even to his royal visitors. On 20 April 1880 King Albert of Saxony had an uncomfortable hour with him:

When the king uttered a differing opinion, Bismarck changed his expression, and the king immediately yielded. It is Bismarck’s misfortune, the king declared, that he cannot listen to a contrary opinion and immediately conjectures ulterior motives. This is what happened in the vote on the stamp tax bill, when no one knew that the matter was important to him. Everyone does his will, the Kaiser first of all.¹⁵¹

In the end, Bismarck’s erratic behaviour led to a serious reverse. On 4 July 1880 Lucius wrote in real exasperation that the final vote on the church policy bill had been a disaster and most of the bill had been rejected.

The Prince is entirely to blame, who systematically rejected with irritation any moderate attempt at criticism. Thus the only result of this episode general annoyance on all sides and against the government … In the Bundesrat also excited negotiations took place … The Prince let loose on Minister Hoffmann and Postmaster General Stephan in such a way as if he wanted to be rid of both. The draft of the stamp duty bill had been the cause of his irritation.¹⁵²

The use-and-discard employment system remained an abiding feature of Bismarck’s treatment of his subordinates. Bismarck used the occasion to abolish the Reich Chancellor’s Office and create instead a series of ‘State Secretaries’ of various departments, which at first looked like an Imperial Cabinet but appearances deceive. These state secretaries reported to Bismarck only, not to the Emperor, had no collective cabinet identity, and had no responsibility to the Reichstag. He now had a system in which he had a set of advisers and department chiefs whom he could dismiss at will, ignore when it suited him, or pretend that they had real authority when he wished to shirk responsibility for something that had gone wrong. As Friedrich Wilhelm Count von Limburg-Styrum (1835–1912) observed cynically, ‘Bismarck is to his ministers the way Don Juan was to his lovers. First he cajoles them, and when he catches them, he lets them go without caring about what happens to them.’¹⁵³ Discarded ministers had the modest consolation that Prussia had a uniform for retired ministers: tailcoat with embroidery and epaulettes¹⁵⁴ and the King often rewarded them with titles and orders, as if he felt guilty that his Minister-President had treated them so badly.

In April 1881 a family crisis broke out which fused the destructive elements in the characters of Otto and Johanna von Bismarck to seething point and broke the heart and spirit of their eldest son. Herbert von Bismarck was born on 12 December 1849, and had become his father’s most faithful amanuensis and disciple. After the obligatory Prussian military career in which he served in the very aristocratic First Dragoon Guards, he entered the ‘family business’ by joining the Foreign Service in 1874 and, as the boss’s son, rose rapidly, though nobody questioned his competence as a young diplomat. Eberhard von Vietsch in his biographical entry in the National German Biography writes of him that ‘he always stuck strictly to his father’s instructions, to whose will he subordinated himself’.¹⁵⁵ He lived for long periods with his parents in Varzin and Friedrichsruh and served together with Christoph Tiedemann as a confidential correspondent during the late 1870s. At some point, he met and fell madly in love with the Princess Elisabeth von Corolath-Beuthen (1839–1914), one of the wittiest, most beautiful, and most popular figures in Berlin high society. Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld (1847–1921) knew Herbert and Elisabeth well and indeed the Princess had been an early flame of his. He wrote of her:

The Princess Elisabeth loved Herbert from the depths of her soul. She was a rich, gifted nature. Beautiful, vain in the way that most beautiful women are, but much too brilliant a person to succumb to vanity. She glowed with interest for the arts and was unusually musical. Proud, elegant in her character, she had gone through a hard school of life in her father’s house where the most unedifying circumstances reigned.¹⁵⁶

Herbert and Elisabeth began a passionate affair in 1879 and Herbert convinced her to get a divorce from her husband, Carl Ludwig Prince zu Carolath-Beuthen, a Silesian prince and grand seigneur, with whom Elisabeth had been unhappily married for some time. In 1881 the divorce was granted and Herbert could now imagine a life with his beloved, who was ten years older, divorced, and a Catholic, not the ideal set of attributes to bring home to Varzin. The story had been circulating in society and finally theVossische Zeitung, a Liberal up-market, anti-Bismarckian daily paper, got hold of it. Georg Brandes (1842–1927), the famous Danish critic and writer, had been living in Berlin for several years and wrote columns for his Danish readers. On 15 March 1881 he wrote a long piece about how Bismarck ‘had never been so unpopular with the cultivated middles classes’ as he was at that moment and how his ‘bilious outbursts and nervous symptoms’ had alienated many. He thought the cause might be deduced from the following ‘mischievous notice’, which he copied out from the ‘Voss’:

Member of the Reichstag, Prince Coralath-Beuthen, has requested a lengthy leave to withdraw to his estates—Princess Carolath has arrived in Messina in Sicily—Count Herbert Bismarck recently left Berlin. The news that he has been travelling on a special mission had not been confirmed.¹⁵⁷

Public scandal had, indeed, made the Bismarcks angry, but there was something worse, indeed, a fatal flaw in the Princess Carolath’s character that damned her from the start. Both her sisters had married ‘enemies’ of Bismarck: one, the famous hostess Marie, known as Mimi, had married Alexander von Schleinitz, briefly Bismarck’s chief as Foreign Minister in 1861; and the other had married Walter Freiherr von Loë (1828–1908), a General Adjutant to the Kaiser and the only Catholic to rise to the rank of Field Marshall in Imperial Germany.¹⁵⁸ In Bismarck’s eyes the connection ruled the Princess out of consideration. Her family belonged to the ‘counter-government’ around the Empress Augusta and he spoke of them as the ‘Hatzfeldt-Loë-Schleinitz clique’. No son of his could entertain relations with these hated foes, a hatred which the implacable Johanna with her card file of enemies further stirred up to white heat. Johanna declared that ‘I will fight tooth and nail to see that the society of Loë, Schleinitz and Hatzfeldt do not come to our table.’¹⁵⁹

After her divorce, Elisabeth Carolath went to Venice, where Herbert had promised to meet and marry her. During April 1881 Herbert, caught between his love and his parents’ intransigence, hesitated. He postponed his departure for Venice and Elisabeth had a breakdown. She wrote to Philipp Eulenburg on 14 April, ‘I was so sick that it was believed that I wouldn’t live and even now I am so weak that I can scarcely take a few steps.’¹⁶⁰ Bismarck tried to buy her off. On 23 April Bleichröder’s Italian agent called on the Princess with an offer. She rejected it with contempt, as the agent advised his chief in a telegram, ‘Princess Carolath wants no interference from third parties and Prince Bismarck could write to her directly.’¹⁶¹ On 28 April Herbert went to see his father to make one last attempt and an epic confrontation followed. Herbert told his father that he intended to go to Venice to marry his Elisabeth. He received in recompense the full dose of the great Bismarck’s threats—he would commit suicide, he would die of a broken heart. There were tears, pleas, rage, attacks of his many illnesses. He also used his legal powers over his son to make the plan impossible on practical grounds, as Herbert wrote to Philipp Eulenburg on 31 April 1881:

In the meantime I am forbidden to leave the service. Therefore I cannot marry without permission (there is no legal possibility until after the lapse of ten months). I must remember that I have nothing to offer the princess, since according to the law of primogeniture, as recently changed with the Emperor’s approval, any son who marries a divorced woman is automatically disinherited. Since my father has nothing but the two great entailed estates, I should have no inheritance whatever. This would be all the same to me, since the split with my parents and their ruin would be the death of me.¹⁶²

Herbert never went to Venice and something certainly died in him as a result. Eberhardt von Vietsch concludes his biographical entry in the NDB by writing that it is possible ‘that his own will, especially in the struggle with his father over the marriage, had been broken.’ He became known for his ‘coarseness and contempt for people’.¹⁶³ On New Years’ Day 1888 Hildegard Spitzemberg reflected on Bismarck’s family and especially on Herbert and Bill, his sons:

The sons get their light and glitter from the parents, but it is hard to take their ruthless pleasure-seeking, their gruff, materialistic tendencies, the brutal use of the right of the stronger, their complete lack of sensitivity for anything fine, educated, cultivated and disciplined. Their love of animals is attractive but the Princess often talks to me about Herbert, whose cynicism deeply troubles her and whom she would really love to see married.¹⁶⁴

Herbert was ruined in ‘society’. He had behaved like a cad. He had let down a beautiful and valued member of high society and had not treated a woman with honour. He had breached a solemn promise of marriage, a legal offence. He was a coward, selfish, insensitive, and so on. General von Loë put it very clearly in his military brevity. ‘If Herbert were not the son of the Almighty Chancellor, he would be brought before a court of honour and it would be a farewell appearance.’¹⁶⁵ Thus Bismarck’s infinite capacity to hate his enemies, indeed anybody who contradicted him, destroyed his eldest son and added to the long list of victims of the distorted and disturbed personality that his genius had allowed to go unchecked. Philipp Eulenburg, who knew everybody in the tragedy, concluded that Bismarck had made a terrible mistake:

Somebody who knew the Princess Elisabeth as well as I did inclines to the view that it was a mistake. For with the destruction of his deepest hope of happiness the son was driven not only into inescapable self-condemnation but also it must bring the pessimism and contempt for people in the once so happy and sunny nature, a development which damaged his future. The Prince had influenced his own future much more deeply by the transformation of his son’s character for which he bore the blame than he could have imagined as the waves of pain, of anxiety and his passion crashed over him.¹⁶⁶

Herbert’s brutality, arrogance, and insensitivity undermined his father’s position and helped to bring about the end of his father’s chancellorship and his own career. Here from Waldersee’s diary is an example of Herbert’s impossible behaviour in public, after he became his father’s deputy as State Secretary in the Foreign Office. This event took place in December 1886:

On the Thursday, Count Lerchenfeld, the Bavarian Ambassador, gave a dinner for Prince Luitpold. At table Herbert Bismarck took the top place, ranked therefore above the Field Marshall, Stolberg, Puttkamer, Boetticher etc. He excused himself by saying that the Chancellor demands that at diplomatic functions the State Secretary of Foreign Affairs must have the first place. There will be a scandal. Moltke announced that he will no longer attend diplomatic dinners. The strange thing about the whole business is that Herbert accepted the place. Were he a sensible person, he would never have done it, now he has the whole reasonable world against him.¹⁶⁷

Herbert, who had become a heavy drinker, died in 1904 just 55 years old, a victim of his father.

Bismarck too paid a price because he loved his cherished eldest son and knew what he had done. Wilhelm von Kardorff wrote to Bleichröder that ‘It seems to me that in political matters we are ailing because of Herbert and Venice; at least the renewed illness of the Chancellor must essentially be blamed on this.’¹⁶⁸ Throughout May 1881 Bismarck had been unwell and, when Lucius visited him on 12 June, Bismarck’s condition shocked him. Bismarck had an infection in the veins of one of his leg and could not walk.

He lies on the sofa with the infected leg and with his stubble on unshaven beard looks old and doddery. Complained with a broken voice: ‘he must throw in the towel. He cannot go on. Nothing that he takes up can he get rid of …’ Bismarck has suffered terrible stomach cramps and passed blood. He blames the constant friction of his job but it must be caused by stomach ulcers … ¹⁶⁹

His chief attending physician had finally given up treating his august but incorrigible patient. On 17 July Lucius noted in his diary that Dr Struck had asked to be relieved of the post of house doctor,

because his health is too fragile to bear the stress that the practice in the Bismarckian house involves. Dr Struck has learned to profit from Bismarck’s style. Tiedemann has repeatedly asked for a government presidency in either Trier or Bromberg, which Bismarck evidently holds against him. Why is he in such a hurry to get away from him?¹⁷⁰

We know only too well why Tiedemann wanted to get away by this point in Bismarck’s career and the odd thing is that the perceptive Lucius could not see it.

On 27 October 1881 Reichstag elections took place. The results infuriated Bismarck because the main gainers had been his enemies. The two conservative parties lost heavily. The Reich Party lost half its seats and its share of the vote fell from 13.6 to 7.5 per cent. The Centre, solid as ever, gained seats to hit 100, but the big winners had been the left liberals, still split into three parties, but they were the clear victors. They increased their share of the vote by a fraction more than 15 per cent and together now had 109 seats, a gain of 86 seats, largely at the expense of the National Liberals, who had cooperated with Bismarck.¹⁷¹

Bismarck’s contempt for the public reached new heights of bitterness laced with dollops of self-pity. They had failed him again, as he told Moritz Busch:

The elections have shown that the German philistine still lives and allows himself to be frightened and led astray by fine speeches and lies … Folly and ingratitude on all sides. I am made the target for every party and group, and they do everything they can to harass me and would like me to serve as whipping boy for them. But when I disappear, they will not know which way to turn, as none of them has a majority or any positive views and aims. They can only criticize and find fault—always say, ‘No.’¹⁷²

He also developed new symptoms, this time a facial neuralgia (trigeminal neuralgia) ‘like a sword being shoved through my cheek’.¹⁷³

On 14 January 1882 the Landtag opened and Robert von Puttkamer represented the Minister-President, who was still away. One important item needed no emphasis and Puttkamer declared it with satisfaction: ‘the friendly relations to the present supreme head of the Catholic Church put us in the position to take account of practical needs by re-establishing diplomatic connections to the Roman Curia. The means to pay for this will be requested of you in due course.’ He also announced what came to be known as the Second Discretionary Bill, which would allow exiled bishops to be pardoned, eliminate the German culture examination for priests and pastors, and lift the Anzeigepflicht (compulsory notification to the Prussian state of clerical appointments) for assistant pastors.¹⁷⁴

On 8 February Eugen Richter (1838–1906), leader of the Left Liberals and along with Windthorst and Lasker one of the critics who most provoked and enraged Bismarck, explained the compromise with the Catholics as part of a deep plan:

Prince Bismarck wants a docile majority … one that is also perhaps amenable to altering universal, direct, equal suffrage, for this, it seems to me, is now coming into question. That is the goal, and this bill is only one piece of the total policy that is meant to lead to it. Now, gentlemen, it must have been clear to Prince Bismarck that he cannot attain such a docile majority from Protestant districts alone. [Cheers from the Zentrum.] After the last election it may have become clearer still. He needs, therefore … tractable deputies from Catholic districts. Consequently it was obvious to him that he must seek a way to get those regions and their deputies into his special power, and such a means is this bill. That is the actual point to this matter. The Catholic clergy, gentlemen, are to be made hostages to the good behaviour of the Zentrum party. Other than this, this entire policy of discretionary authority has no purpose.¹⁷⁵

Bismarck returned to Berlin for the Landtag and Reichstag sessions and on 18 February Holstein saw him.

I asked him (B) if he was going to attend the debate on the Kulturkampf in the Landtag. ‘Why should I? The more undecided things are the better. The question is by its very nature an open one, and the conflict will never be resolved because ever since Colchas there has been a group of people in every nation who hold as an axiom, “We know God’s will better than the rest of you.” If I had been able to conduct the Kulturkampf entirely in accordance with my own ideas, I should have been satisfied with inspection of schools and the suspension of the Catholic Section of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs. But the attitude of the Conservatives obliged me to reckon with a majority which liked to beat the Kulturkampf drum as loudly as possible.’¹⁷⁶

Once again we see all the characteristic features of Bismarck’s approach to politics: to leave affairs open-ended, or in the words used to Holstein, ‘the more undecided things are the better’, and that linked with denial of his responsibility for what had gone wrong. It was ludicrous to say, and by this time a disillusioned Holstein knew it, that ‘if I had been able to conduct the Kulturkampf entirely in accordance with my own ideas’. Whose ideas and whose absolute authority had been behind it, if not Bismarck’s? The frustration at his defeat came out in his furious attacks on Windthorst, who on 17 March 1882 wrote to Professor Heinrich Geffken: ‘I cannot speak with the Prince at all; the full bucket of his fury is pouring over me … Bismarck will not cease persecuting me until I lie in my grave.’¹⁷⁷ These three attributes—wonderful flexibility of strategy and tactics, shirking responsibility for what went wrong, rage and brutality to his enemies—almost always ended in hypochondria and withdrawal to bed. Like clockwork that followed, as Lucius recorded on 5 March 1882, ‘For three weeks Bismarck has been unwell, sees no one, lets matters go, and gives no directives, neither on church nor on tax policy.’¹⁷⁸

He got up from his bed on 27 March 1882 and admitted defeat in the Landtag. He surrendered two days before Windthorst was set to reintroduce the sacrament motion, and asked him if he would accept the bill if he (Bismarck) dropped theAnzeigepflichtcompletely. Windthorst accepted and the Conservatives did likewise. On 31 March 1882 the Second Discretionary Relief Bill, as amended, passed the Landtag.¹⁷⁹ Bit by bit the apparatus of persecution of the Catholic Church had begun to come down. Bismarck had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Ludwig Windthorst and the Catholic Centre Party in the Reich and Prussia. On 24 April diplomatic relations between Germany and the Vatican were restored and on 25 April the Conservatives and Centre introduced a resolution to abolish completely the Falk system of interference with the disciplinary and pastoral life of the Catholic Church.¹⁸⁰ The wounds would never entirely heal, as Catholics well into the twentieth century felt themselves to be second-class citizens. On 15 October 1882 many prominent Catholics, the leadership of the Centre, August Reichensperger, Windthorst, and others boycotted the national festival, in the presence of the Imperial Family, to celebrate the completion of Cologne Cathedral. On 31 October Windthorst wrote to Bishop Kopp, ‘We cannot be sure that Bismarck won’t make a coup de main [i.e. call a snap election] … Il est le diable.’¹⁸¹

On 14 November Lucius confided to his diary his distress at Bismarck’s handling of the end of the Kulturkampf:

Bismarck has underestimated the curia, the Conservatives say, and made great mistakes in dealing with it. All the concession made so far have not been matched by any concession on its part. He acts too hastily under angry impulses and listens to no advice.¹⁸²

In October Bill Bismarck brought his doctor to see his father. Bill suffered from obesity and the doctor, a remarkable South German, Ernst Schweninger, seems to have helped him to lose weight. Schweninger, who was born in Freystadt in the Upper Pfalz, went to Munich, where he qualified as MD and had a brilliant career ahead of him. In 1879 he was arrested and sentenced to four months in prison for what a contemporary American newspaper called ‘an atrocious act in a public place’. His offence was against the widow of his best friend and it was committed at his grave, to which she had gone with flowers.¹⁸³ Quite how Schweninger got to Bill Bismarck with that past is a mystery, but he did. Schweninger played an important part in Bismarck’s life and his treatment reveals certain traits in Bismarck’s psyche. Schweninger practised a type of medicine utterly at variance with the scientific, white-coated model dominant in the nineteenth century and not unknown in the twenty-first either. The handsome 32-year-old with his great black beard and sparkling eyes made an impression on Johanna von Bismarck, who had by this stage become desperate about ‘Ottochen’s’ health. On 10 October 1882 she wrote to Herbert: ‘We liked him very much, and now he has sent all kinds of little bottles for Papa.’¹⁸⁴ But Schweninger brought something more fundamental to the bedside than little bottles; he brought a different way to treat patients.

In the academic year 1904–5 a young medical student Richard Koch (1882–1949) attended a seminar by Schweninger, now, of course, famous as Bismarck’s doctor. The seminar took place in the old Charité hospital building in Berlin:

Only a few students were present, all of them strange characters, young and old, types one usually meets in vegetarian restaurants. Dr Schweninger himself was a striking figure. At that time he was 55 years of age. He was of medium height, rather skinny, had pitch black hair as well as a big beard, very lively eyes, a typical Bavarian. He wore a top hat, morning dress, a white waistcoat and an elegant tie. This elegance was unusual for an academic and did not fit his rustic features.¹⁸⁵

No other faculty member showed up in such garb; it caused a scandal—a doctor with no white coat! He said outrageous, unscientific things and enjoyed provoking his white-coated medical students. Koch only returned because he wanted to argue:

So I returned, got even angrier, but came again. Schweninger’s theory was roughly as follows: ‘school medicine treats illness as abstract things that seldom happen in reality, only in textbooks. One should not treat illnesses but ill people.’¹⁸⁶ … Schweninger’s examination of patients had the students in an uproar. They argued with him but he had a way to deal with patients that nobody else taught. ‘There is a rule—answer as if you were the patient.’¹⁸⁷

In May 1883 Schweninger arrived from Munich and began his treatment of his difficult patient. Here is his account of his first evening with Bismarck as told to K. A. von Müller:

Bismarck was on the verge of physical collapse. He believed that he had already had a stroke and suffered from severe headaches and complete sleeplessness. No treatment had done him any good. He mistrusted all doctors. A relative, [he said] had taken his life because of a similar disorder; ‘That will also be my fate’. ‘Tonight, your Highness,’ said the doctor, ‘you will sleep.’ ‘We shall wait and see,’ Bismarck replied sceptically. Schweninger wrapped him in a damp body roll [Leibwickeln] and gave him some drops of valerian, telling him, however, that it was not a sleeping potion. Then the doctor sat in the easy chair next to his bed and took one of Bismarck’s hands in his own, ‘like a mother with a restless child’ until the chancellor fell asleep. When he awakened in the morning, the doctor was still at his side and Bismarck could not believe that it was day and that he had actually slept the entire night. ‘From that moment, he trusted me.’¹⁸⁸

Schweninger set out his therapeutic technique in these words:

I determined as far as possible the working time and the tasks to be undertaken during it; regulated the time and amount of recreation, exercise and rest; supervised eating and drinking, according to time, quantity and quality; regulated getting up and going to bed, intervened whenever necessary either to moderate or stimulate; and finally had the satisfaction of noting real progress in body and spirit.¹⁸⁹

The pains, the facial neuralgia, and the headaches vanished; Bismarck was able to ride again. His weight began to go down as the list below shows (in pounds):

From 1886 on he never went above 227 pounds, a perfectly reasonable weight for a man of six feet four. Schweninger had, in effect, saved Bismarck’s life.¹⁹⁰

How did he do it? Richard Koch explained it this way:

The real secret of Schweninger’s power over Bismarck was in his absolute honesty. He did not hide behind scientific jargon but talked to him about his illness, treatment and cure in his own language … He felt the vocation to spread his conviction to destroy conservative ‘pseudo-scientific’ medicine and replace it by own new ‘natural way of healing’.¹⁹¹

Schweninger practised holistic medicine in the age of Pasteur and the white coat. It looked unscientific to his students in 1905 but it had one peculiar technical advantage that Bismarck’s previous physicians seemed unable to understand: Schweninger treated Bismarck, the person, who needed care and attention. One could say that he had come near to death by being Bismarck. His destructive urges and rages, his need for revenge, his paranoia and sleeplessness had psychological causes. They lay in the dark recesses of his colossal and complex nature. Bismarck made himself ill by his turbulent psychic reactions. He needed tender loving care and support, and, for reasons that we have seen, Johanna, angular, full of vindictiveness herself, stirred his hatreds rather than calmed them. She could not give that maternal care that he desperately needed. If we look at Schweninger’s own account of his first treatment, we see what he did. He put the child to bed, ‘wrapped in a damp body roll [Leibwickeln]’ (warmth of the womb?) and gave him ‘some drops of valerian, telling him, however, that it was not a sleeping potion’. Valerian is a herb that grows wild all over western Europe and probably worked because it came from the loving comforter. Then the doctor sat in the easy chair next to his bed and took one of Bismarck’s hands in his own, ‘like a mother with a restless child’. This is exactly what a parent does when a little child has a nightmare—holds his or her hand for comfort until the child falls asleep. Wilhelmine Mencken Bismarck failed to give the child Otto that elementary maternal care. He knew it and hated her for it. Schweninger saved Bismarck’s life by giving him a surrogate for that missing care and by controlling the eating habits of the entire family.

On 8 June 1883 Johanna wrote to Herbert that Schweninger had prescribed a new diet for the entire family—tea or milk with eggs for breakfast, a ‘little’ fish and roast meat (no vegetables) at noon, a small jug of milk at 4.00 and yet another in the evening. To eat ‘less and more frequently’. Johanna had developed ‘a mighty trust’ and prayed that this ‘pleasant, modest, cheerful and unspeakably demanding’ personality would remain by her husband’s side for the rest of the summer.¹⁹² He stayed for the rest of Bismarck’s life and in gratitude Bismarck imposed his ‘House Doctor’ on the Berlin medical faculty, which regarded him as a charlatan and refused to speak to him. As Koch writes, ‘only in 1900 did Schweninger get a position befitting his qualifications. He became head of the medical department in the county hospital in Gross-Lichterfelde.’¹⁹³

The other great change in the 1880s lay in social policy. On 9 January 1882 Bismarck answered a parliamentary question from Georg Freiherr von Herling, a rising younger leader of the Centre, who during the First World War briefly served as one of Bismarck’s successors as Chancellor.

Have the Allied Government plans, as part of their concern for the working classes, to expand the existing factory legislation, in particular to the end that Sunday working be abolished as soon as feasible, that female labour be further restricted and that … the legal regulation of artisans be augmented by special protective rules and the factory inspectorate’s officials charged with that task be also equipped with comprehensive powers?

Bismarck’s reply indicated that the answer would be a qualified yes and that such provisions would be included in the large forthcoming package of legislation that the Allied governments would submit in the Spring. He then let slip in passing during a long and unusually flaccid speech one of the prime motives that had moved him:

the perception that the mass of workers regard even the attempts of the government to improve their conditions with such deep mistrust that they prefer to vote for those parties which in the area of economic activity advocate the right of the stronger and abandon the weak in the battle against the might of Capital …¹⁹⁴

In other words, workers trusted left liberals like Lasker, in spite of his free market ideas, and not Bismarck. Bismarck believed that the anti-Socialist legislation had not gone far enough. Voters could vote for, and candidates could stand as, Social Democratic representatives in the Reichstag. The SPD had not been crushed in the October elections but had, in fact, gained three seats. Bismarck knew that he had to do something and he had for some time been working on a plan. In the Ministry of Trade, he found a willing, if not always biddable, civil servant in Theodor Lohmann, a Hanoverian Christian with social reformist urges. Bismarck in this case had a clearer concept of the next step than the expert, though both agreed that accident and illness insurance had to be provided. Lohmann wanted to foster Christian self-discipline; Bismarck wanted a state insurance system with compulsory contributions by employer and worker. Bismarck was right.¹⁹⁵ In spring 1883 Bismarck launched the first part of the new social welfare legislation, an accident insurance bill and a sickness insurance bill to cover the period of thirteen weeks after accidents. On 15 June 1883 the official government gazette, Neueste Mittheilungen, saluted the passage by the Reichstag of the sickness insurance legislation:

By the acceptance of the principle of compulsory state insurance, an end has been put to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter for those affected and formally and publicly asserts the role of the state in the provision of care for workers who have become ill in the course of employment.¹⁹⁶

Bismarck as a non-liberal could do what the liberal democracies found and still find hard: to see the state as the guarantor of justice for the poor.

During the 1880s Bismarck completed the social security network by getting an accident insurance system into place which the Reichstag accepted on 27 June 1884 and an old age and disability insurance bill passed in 1889. The state system of social security gave Germany the first modern social welfare safety net in the world and still forms part of the modern German social security system, a significant achievement and entirely Bismarck’s doing.

His restlessness continued in spite of better health. During 1884 and 1885 he again began to tinker with the institutions of the Reich. He set up a State Council. It caused much ill-will and confusion and did not work. He tinkered with the acquisition of colonies for a while in 1884 and 1885. The pressure from a new type of merchant adventurer, the illusion that colonies might supply a protected market for German goods and yield cheap raw materials, the importance of some sort of foreign policy success to maintain his reputation and the chance to exercise his wizardry, all contributed to his sudden conversion to colonialism. On 24 April 1884 the German Reich extended ‘its protection’ over Walfisch Bay and other adjacent territories which then became German Southwest Africa (today’s Republic of Namibia), Togoland, German East Africa (Tanzania today), and some islands in the Pacific. The colonies never played a significant economic or social role. By 1903, the total German population of the colonies amounted to 5,125, of whom 1,567 were soldiers and administrators.¹⁹⁷

On 1 April 1885 Bismarck celebrated his 70th birthday. The event became a national celebration. All over Germany there were huge festivals. A fund to purchase the Schönhausen estate as a national birthday gift met its target. The Emperor and the entire group of royal princes called on Bismarck. Lucius attended the occasion.¹⁹⁸ The aged father, well pleased with his son, shed tears. But the son had now become old himself during the twenty-three years he had served the father.¹⁹⁹

Bismarck had grown old in other ways. As Phili Eulenburg noticed on a visit to the Bismarcks, the two well-known rooms had not changed save for the addition of ‘a red silk couch cover with a yellow pattern’. The rooms showed the taste of the typical Pomeranian Junker family of an earlier generation, that is, ‘its absence of taste … but then we old Prussians have always been tasteless’. On the walls Johanna had hung a selection of conventional landscapes. One by Morgenstern had been sent back to the artist because the Prince on seeing it had said ‘too many clouds’.²⁰⁰ He began to wear a long black tunic buttoned up to the neck around which he tied a handkerchief, which made him look uncannily like a Cathedral canon in the Catholic Church.

He seems to have read no contemporary German literature, no Freytag, no Heyse, and apparently no Theodor Fontane either, even though Fontane confessed to the journalist Maximilian Harden in March 1894 that ‘in nearly everything I have written since 1870, the Sulphur-Yellow (der Schwefelgelbe) [Bismarck’s sulfur-yellow, cuirassier uniform—JS] goes around and, although the conversation touches him only fleetingly, the talk is always of him as of Charles or Otto the Great.’²⁰¹ He never went to a Wagner opera nor listened to music much after Beethoven. He had become the national grandfather, though he alone failed to see that.

If he was old, the Emperor and court circle were extremely old, as Phili Eulenburg wrote in his diary on the occasion of the visit of the Emperor to Bavaria in 1885. General Hartmann called them ‘walking corpses’. Eulenburg watched with particular interest ‘the old General Physician Lauer who for years has been completely mummified. He had attached to himself a fat staff doctor with vulgar legs, and the two of them stare uninterruptedly at the Kaiser with great Argus eyes. God spare us a treatment by these two for their only case is the one old man.’²⁰² The 88-year-old Emperor continued to be the foundation of Bismarck’s power, though most of the time he refused to admit it.

When the Reichstag opened on 5 November 1886, the speech from the Throne announced that the Allied governments would demand a renewal of the Septennat, for another seven years to begin on 1 April. Both the increase in army size under it and the cost fell within the 1 per cent of the population (now much larger than in 1871) and the 225 marks per head but the bill advanced the renewal of the previous Septennat by a year, a move evidently designed to provoke the Reichstag. Bismarck began to stir the press with threats of war and many found it convincing.

On 20 August 1886 the handsome, young Prince Alexander of Battenberg had been kidnapped by a group of rebellious officers and taken from Bulgaria. On 4 September Prince Alexander announced his intention to abdicate and was allowed to take his leave of his subjects in Sofia which he did with great dignity. He returned to Germany and rumours began again that he would get engaged to the Princess Victoria of Prussia, the sister of the future Kaiser William II. On 23 October 1886 the Crown Princess wrote to her mother Queen Victoria:

The attacks of the Berlin press on Sandro continue—it is mean, and shameful, besides utterly ridiculous. It is, of course, to flatter the Tsar, and the great man …²⁰³

Bismarck went into a super-rage at the Crown Princess and women who intended to undermine his diplomacy by arranging a marriage with Sandro Battenberg. The Russians would threaten the Reich and war might ensue because the Crown Princess Victoria really had lurid urges of her own to have Alexander close to her.

The crisis in the Imperial family coincided with an outbreak of trouble internationally. The appointment of the bellicose General Georges Boulanger (1837–91) as French Minister of War in 1886 caused alarm in the German General Staff. Boulanger had pledged to strengthen the army and made aggressive public speeches which earned him the nickname Général Revanche. Bismarck decided to respond in kind. On 11 January 1887 Bismarck made one of the most famous speeches of his career. The speech began with the assertion that ‘we have no warlike needs, we are so to speak a saturated state’, one of Bismarck’s most famous phrases. He continued that Imperial policy in the last sixteen years had been ‘to preserve the peace. The task was not light.’ He then reviewed the excellent results of his policies, especially the relations between Austria and Russia, both united by the Three Emperors’ League, renewed in 1884, and the Dual Alliance. France was, alas, another matter. French military improvements and the threat posed by Boulanger made it essential to increase the army and to do it now. Of course, that was hardly the real reason, since the new Septennat called for a very modest expansion in troops and funds. He then threw down a challenge to the Reichstag which nobody could miss:

The Allied Governments stand by the full Septennat and will not deviate by a hair from it. You will never make the army dependent on shifting majorities. Annual appropriations, eliminating battalions already approved is a fantasy, and an absolute impossibility. We want an Imperial Army not a parliamentary one, which is to be commanded by Messrs Windthorst and Richter … The Allied Governments will not enter into long negotiations. The Reichstag shall accept the bill as soon as possible and in all its provisions.²⁰⁴

The news that Bismarck intended to open the debate on the Septennat had spread through Berlin and the crowd wanting to hear Bismarck was so great that even Baroness Spitzemberg, well connected as she was, could not get a ticket. She dined with Count Wartensleben and

many distinguished people, especially ministers, who told me all the details of the session so that I was almost there. The speech of the Prince, which I read in the evening, was splendid. Whatever else there will be a dissolution, if the Septennat is not approved. Woellwarth even told me today of a possible Staatsstreich [coup d’état—JS], that is, an alteration of the franchise, since better election result are not to be expected.²⁰⁵

The gamble had high stakes. Bismarck hoped to ram the army bill down the throats of parliament. If they refused the peremptory demand, there would be an immediate dissolution and Bismarck would go to the country with his usual scare tactics, as he had done successfully in October 1878. That time he had broken the Liberals’ strong position and given himself room to pass the tariff and other anti-free market legislation. This time he wanted to reduce the leverage of the Centre by a ‘war in sight’ election and with strengthened conservative and National Liberal fractions he could abolish universal suffrage, formerly his best weapon but now increasingly impossible to control. On 14 January Bismarck dissolved the Reichstag and the campaign began.

The Centre immediately recognized that it was in danger and the fraction leader von Franckenstein wrote to Monsignor Angelo di Pietro (1828–1914), nuncio in Bavaria, two days after the dissolution. Vatican circles had let it be known that it would please the Curia and speed the final demolition of Catholic disabilities if the fraction would support the Septennat:

I do not know whether the Holy See finds it a matter of indifference whether or not the Zentrum returns in the same strength or whether the Holy See harbours the wish that the Zentrum might disappear from the Reichstag. I do not need to say that the Zentrum was always happy to act on the orders of the Holy See when it was a question of ecclesiastical legislation. I allowed myself, however, as early as 1880 to call attention to the fact that it is absolutely impossible for the Zentrum to obey directives on non-ecclesiastical legislation.²⁰⁶

On 21 January 1887 Archbishop Ludovic Jacobini, the nuncio in Vienna since 1879 and the main channel between the German government and the Vatican, sent round a note to the German episcopate:

Considered as a political party, the Zentrum is allowed freedom of action always … If the Holy Father believed that he should notify the Zentrum of his wishes in the controversy over the Septennat, then that is to be ascribed to the circumstance that connections with the religious and moral order were tied in with that affair. Above all, there were cogent grounds for believing that the final revision of the May Laws would receive a strong impulse from the government if the latter were satisfied with the Zentrum’s vote on the Septennat.²⁰⁷

Windthorst had a big speech to make in Cologne and on the night of 4 February 1887 he was boarding the train when he heard the station news-boys yelling, ‘Pope against Windthorst! Pope against the Zentrum! Pope for the Septennat!’ He bought the paper and, as the train pulled out of Hanover and his travelling companion Deputy Dr Adam Bock began to read the article aloud, he discovered that it contained the text of the Second Jacobini Note. He knew that one of the German bishops, almost certainly the Bismarck fellow-traveller, Bishop Kopp, had leaked it to the Bismarck press to ‘break his back’, but as Windthorst had once warned Bismarck, he would have to rise very early indeed to outwit Ludwig Windthorst. On 5 February Windthorst rose to speak in the Gürzenich Hall, Cologne, and was received with ‘deafening applause and foot stamping’. He deftly turned the Papal letter on its head:

If anyone has the right to rejoice it is we … Of course, it cannot be overlooked that the Holy Father wished that the law might be adopted. In this proclamation, however, he based his wish not on the material content of the bill, but rather on grounds of expediency, from the standpoint of diplomatic considerations and relations … had it been possible, we should have granted it of our own accord, without compulsion … the impossible no one can do [opposition had been in the party’s programme] … And above all, away with that wicked Guelph, with Windthorst! … But, gentlemen, old Windthorst is still alive. He will not do these people the favour of dying … And, however difficult the situations are, if we are true to ourselves and to the cause we represent, then God will also be with us. For what we preeminently strive for is God’s cause.

Windthorst said to a friend as he climbed down from the rostrum, ‘Well, I lied my way through that one.’²⁰⁸ But he had survived—just! On 9 February the German bishop’s conference supported Windthorst and the Zentrum against Leo XIII. When on 21 February 1887 Reichstag elections took place, the Centre survived intact. It lost 2.5 per cent of its vote but only one seat. Ninety-eight members were returned and voted as a bloc against the Septennat. On the other hand, the two conservative parties and the National Liberals had formed an electoral ‘Cartel’ that stated whichever party had the highest vote on the first ballot would get the support of the other two in the second round. It worked. The two conservative parties gained 15 seats but the National Liberals gained 48 at the expense of the left parties, which lost 42. The Socialists held their share of the vote but because of coalitions against them between first and second ballot they only got 2.8 per cent of the seats and lost 13 deputies.²⁰⁹

Windthorst had survived with his party behind him but the collapse of the left Liberals meant that Bismarck no longer needed to negotiate for his support. He came close to despair. On 22 February August Stein recorded Windthorst’s reaction:

He sat—or lay, actually—next to me on the sofa and for the first time spoke bitterly of the ‘inspired calumnies’ he had heard. ‘They do not hit me, but after this election I am beginning to doubt the future of a people who allows its best friends to be so vilified … After my death it will surely conquer. Because I believe in the divine governance of the world. Perhaps you are laughing now, dear friend. I cannot see you. No matter. What I say sounds old-fashioned but I have fared very well by this belief. It alone has allowed me to hold out.’²¹⁰

In the camp of the defeated Liberals, bitterness was also great. On 25 February Ludwig Bamberger wrote to Franz Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, the Bavarian left liberal, and expressed his dismay:

Although it was accomplished by crude cunning and coercion, I say to myself: the new representation is a true expression of the German popular will. Junkerdom and the Catholic church both know very clearly what they want, while the Bürgertum are childishly innocent, politically naïve, and in need of neither justice nor freedom. Junkerdom and Catholic church will join hands, and the burghers will get what they deserve, with the National Liberals contributing the political music. Il faut que les destines s’accomplissent. The crown prince is now relieved of all embarrassment. He will do what Bismarck wants.²¹¹

The shrewd political general, Alfred Graf von Waldersee, saw what Bismarck had accomplished, as he recorded in his diary on 11 March:

Things goes excellently in the Reichstag. The Septennat went through smartly and there are distinct signs that the Zentrum has begun to fall apart. Without doubt Bismarck has against all the doubters once more done one of his master strokes.²¹²

In foreign affairs, Bismarck had apparently achieved another ‘one of his master strokes’, as Holstein reported to his cousin Ida von Stülpnagel on 14 March:

Two days ago ratifications of various treaties between Austria, Italy and Germany were exchanged. Above all we now have a defensive alliance with Italy against France. There is in addition an agreement between England and Italy, loosely knit it is true, concerning ‘attempts to preserve the status quo in the Black Sea’. Hatzfeldt telegraphed yesterday evening that Austria had adhered to this agreement. Thus my exertions of the past six months have been crowned with success … After a long gap I have been seeing the Chancellor in recent weeks. He has become an old man. The days when he could claim to think of everything are past: now one has to try to help and support him whenever possible …²¹³

The Chancellor had secured this complex set of agreement only by conceding to Austria and Britain a set of assurances about Russian expansion into the Mediterranean, the issue which had nearly caused Britain to go to war with Russia in 1878. The so-called Mediterranean Agreement had been concluded two months before the Three Emperors League was about to expire. The gap between Russia and Austria had now widened to such an extent that the Tsar would no longer renew the Treaty. During May and June 1887 Bismarck and the Russian Ambassador in Berlin drew up a separate agreement that has come to be known as the Reinsurance Treaty, a secret agreement signed on 18 June 1887. In it Bismarck promised ‘to give moral and diplomatic support’ for any measures that the Tsar might deem necessary to defend the entrance to the Black Sea.²¹⁴ The complexity of these diplomatic ties, according to Herbert von Bismarck, had an ulterior motive, as he explained to Holstein:

The secret treaty, nowadays called the Reinsurance Treaty, had existed since 1887. Prince Bismarck eagerly indulged in his treaty spinning in every direction. The more tangled the mesh, the more difficult it was to find one’s way about in it without Prince Bismarck. ‘My father is the only person who can handle this business,’ as Count Herbert Bismarck used to say.²¹⁵

The treaty—whatever its merit or demerits—shows that Bismarck no longer had room to manoeuvre. All the squares on the board had now been blocked and no Bismarckian combinations could conceal that. His victories in domestic and foreign affairs rested on unsteady conditions which must change and soon. The next Reichstag election returned the Reichstag to its balance which the temporary war scare election had upset. The cartel parties lost a catastrophic 84 seats. Windthorst’s Centre returned 106 deputies and became the strongest party in terms of seats in the Reichstag. The hated Social Democratic Party raised its share to 19.7 per cent and won 1. 4 million votes. It became the largest party in the parliament measured by numbers of votes. Bismarck’s ‘enemies of the Reich’ now controlled its parliament. Thus in both foreign and domestic politics the Bismarckian system of government had ceased to function.