Conclusion
Blood and Iron
‘The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.’
Otto von Bismarck, 30 September 1862
Irony n.
2. fig. A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things. (In F. ironie du sort.)
Oxford English Dictionary
Many contemporaries believed that Bismarck’s power—and his ability to hold on to it—had something inhuman to it. But what? Not even the devout Roman Catholic Windthorst could have believed that Bismarck was literally le diable, which he once called him but, as the greatest German parliamentarian of the nineteenth century and, perhaps, the shrewdest, Windthorst sensed, as others did, that there was an unearthly dimension to him, perhaps what Ernst Rentch and later Freud would call das Unheimliche(uncanny). When Odo Russell and Robert Morier called Bismarck the Zornesbock, the raging billy goat,1 did they choose the Bock, knowing that the devil used the goat as one of his many disguises?
Yet Bismarck’s personality had such contradictions in it that it could be experienced as positive or negative—angelic or demonic—sometimes both at the same time. Hildegard von Spitzemberg, who saw him regularly over thirty years, could never get over the contrasts in her great friend. She admitted in her diary on 4 January 1888 that ‘the apparent contradictions in the powerful personality are of such an intense magic, that I am bewitched anew every time’.2 Both Stosch and Baroness Spitzemberg used words like ‘bewitched’ or ‘enchantment’ to describe the impact of his presence. Bismarck in conversation or in a formal speech seems to have had a special charm, not, as we have seen, charisma in the Weberian sense, but, nonetheless something irresistibly compelling. Disraeli wrote a diary entry about Bismarck’s conversation: ‘His views on all subjects are original, but there is no strain, no effort at paradox. He talks as Montaigne writes.’3 Ludwig Bamberger, who knew him well, described the terrifying and yet charming way he looked:
Behind the curtain of his heavy moustache one can always only partly observe him. With his usual chattiness there appears something soft and always lightly smiling across his broad lips, but directly behind lies something powerfully tearing, definitely like a predatory beast. This charming, lightly smiling mouth can open suddenly and swallow the interlocutor. He has a bulging chin, an upside-down teacup of flesh, with the convex side turned outward. The eyes are mistrustful/friendly, lurking/bright, cold/flashing, determined not to reveal what goes on behind them unless he intends it.4
There were times when Bismarck revealed what went on behind those eyes: once in October 1862 when he bragged to Kurt Schlözer how he had successfully deceived all the political actors in the conflict over the army,5 and the other when he explained his tactics in gaining dominance in student life: ‘I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.’6 Both Schlözer and Motley believed that they had heard the authentic Bismarck. Motley built it into a novel when he returned to Boston in the 1830s, long before his friend had become the great Bismarck of history. That cynical cunning startled even the sceptical Schlözer in October 1862. He began to see Bismarck as a kind of malign genius who, behind the various postures, concealed an ice-cold contempt for his fellow human beings and a methodical determination to control and rule them. His easy chat combined blunt truths, partial revelations, and outright deceptions. His extraordinary double ability to see how groups would react and the willingness to use violence to make them obey, the capacity to read group behaviour and the force to make them move to his will, gave him the chance to exercise what I have called his ‘sovereign self’.
Another, very perceptive contemporary saw what lay behind the charm and fluency—an absence of principle. Clement Theodor Perthes warned Roon against Bismarck in early 1864, ‘the man in Prussia, who calculates so coldly, who prepares so cunningly, who is so careless of the means that he chooses …’7 ‘Cold’, ‘cunning’, and ‘careless about means’ add up to a kind of evil or what Queen Victoria quite openly called ‘wicked’.8
Even old and close friends received rough treatment if they refused to bend to Bismarck’s will. When his childhood friend Moritz von Blanckenburg refused to accept his offer of a ministry, ‘he threatened me with a transfer to Stettin in the most ruthless way.’9He drew a knife on Hans von Kleist on one occasion and warned him on another that he would have him arrested for not revealing the source of a leaked memorandum. He dismissed his old mentor, Ludwig von Gerlach, from the high court in 1874 without an apparent twinge of remorse. No sentiment withstood his unbridled urge to dominate. General Alfred Count von Waldersee summed up what many thought in a diary entry from March 1890. Bismarck, he wrote, ‘has a very bad character; he has not hesitated to disclaim his friends and those who have helped him most.’10
His contemporaries used a variety of terms to describe Bismarck’s unusual role in transforming Prussia and Germany. With what historical figure might he be compared? He was the over-mighty courtier, or a Richelieu, or a major domus. However, none adequately caught the breadth and depth of his huge personality. Often his friends and enemies called him a dictator, an odd usage in a state with an absolute monarch. Disraeli wrote in 1878: ‘He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest of the Prussians and all the permanent foreign diplomacy, tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile.’11 As one of his friends, General von Schweinitz observed in 1886: ‘The dictatorship of Bismarck, which has had on the whole an educational and positive influence on the mass of the people, has degraded the higher levels of the official world. It leaves room in a strange way for a very impressive secondary tyranny.’12
Schweinitz was wrong. Dictatorship always degrades those who exercise it and those subject to it. When Bismarck left office, the servility of the German people had been cemented, an obedience from which they never recovered. The upper reaches of society had been debased as the general rightly noticed, and they too never recovered. Government by intrigue had brought Bismarck to power and intrigue around Kaiser William II brought him down. Like the traditional palace favourite, he rose by camarilla and fell by it. He was a dictator but one dependent on the will of the King.
Among the seven deadly sins, Bismarck committed repeatedly and without limit the sin of wrath. He bubbled with rage. Nobody ever indulged himself so utterly in vehement or violent anger as Otto von Bismarck. He raged and hated until he nearly killed himself. He lost his temper at the slightest provocation. He wrote to his brother that he had got into such ‘a rage over those who keep knocking at my door and annoy me with questions and bills that I could bite the table’.13 The rest of his life he stewed and fumed and suffered the aftermath of these fits in sleeplessness and psychosomatic illnesses. The pretexts were often trivial. The Federal Council rejected the appointment of an obscure Hanoverian to head the postal service. The stenographers at the Reichstag took down a speech incorrectly and he saw in a harmless mistake a conspiracy against him. The absurd conflict over stamp duty on postal transfers caused one of his most famous rages. He flew into a rage when the President of the Reichstag rang the bell to call him to order. Alexander von Below-Hohendorf got it right when he called Bismarck ‘sick unto death’. In a letter of 7 December 1859 he wrote to Moritz von Blanckenburg that Bismarck had become deranged by his concentration on his enemies and ‘extreme thoughts and feelings’. The cure was simple and Christian: ‘love thine enemies!’ This was the best ‘door’ through which to release ‘the mounting pressures from the darkness of his sick body and the best medicine against the amazing visions and thoughts [Vorstellungen] that threaten to draw him to death’.14
That advice made sense. Bismarck’s sick soul needed a release and to his Junker friends that release could be found at any moment through penitence, grace, and the love of God. Prayer, as von Below urged on him, has as its object change; the need to accept responsibility for one’s sins, to acknowledge one’s weaknesses, as the Book of Common Prayer’s general confession of 1662 puts it: ‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against Thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.’
This surrender to divine will must have been hard for Bismarck. The liturgy repeatedly urges penitents not only to come humbly to God but to seek forgiveness from those we have hurt or offended. I cannot recall a letter in which Bismarck apologized for anything more serious than not writing or forgetting a family birthday. He certainly made no apology to his enemies and, when five cabinet ministers asked permission to go to Lasker’s funeral, he said ‘certainly not’—and this tells us a great deal—none of them went. It occurred to none of these high-placed gentlemen that Bismarck’s refusal to curb his vindictiveness even before the open coffin was an outrage. Why indeed did they need his permission? Why did they not simply go to pay their respects?
His wrath destroyed his eldest son, Herbert, who could not marry the woman he loved because Bismarck hated her family. They belonged to the clique of his ‘enemies’. The objects of his rage and hatred mattered more to him than his child. Rancour destroyed this precious bond—the love of father for his son—as it destroyed almost all his old friendships. It poisoned his mind and soul and it led him to seek revenge, never repentance.
His unbridled misogyny needs a further word. Bismarck turned his life into a physical and psychic hell because he so implacably despised the Queen/Empress Augusta and the Crown Princess Victoria. Again and again the ‘strong woman’ played the role of evil enchantress in his psyche. These all-powerful women dominated their weak husbands and threatened Bismarck from all sides. He sensed conspiracies everywhere. The women caused all his difficulties. He imagined their influence as malign and pervasive to a degree that can fairly be called paranoid. One need not be a Freudian to see how the hatred that Bismarck felt for his cold, intelligent, and unloving mother became an obsession as he exercised his genius and will in politics. Here Bismarck got caught in a convolution from which he could not extricate himself. He relied on William I’s weakness to be able govern. Yet that weakness arose in part from the strength of the Queen. Had William I not been pliant in dealing with Augusta, he would not have been pliant in dealing with Bismarck. This desperate struggle to control an emotional old man who actually held power that neither Bismarck nor Augusta could entirely control wore Bismarck’s nerves to shreds. He had to re-enact day after day, year after year, the agony of his childhood, the little boy at the point of an upside-down triangle and at the mercy of the struggle between the threatening woman and weak man. His rage, his sweats, his sleeplessness arose frequently from this impotence. The most powerful man in Europe, swollen with pride and bilious, had to bow to the old lady who happened to be the Queen. The humiliation must have been unbearable.
His confession to Hans von Kleist in 1851 that he could not control his sexual urges adds a further twist to the pain. The stubborn refusal of Johanna von Bismarck to make herself into a society lady for him meant that nowhere could he find consolation or a way to escape the Oedipal triangle which Prussian kingship forced him to re-enact every day. Indeed Johanna von Bismarck expressed her love for her husband by learning to hate as fiercely as he did. Hildegard Spitzemberg, Holstein, and many others noticed how bitter and vindictive Johanna was. Nobody in the Bismarck household saw that they did him harm by stirring his poisonous feelings.
The king would not always give in to Bismarck’s demands. He was a conscientious Mason and protected Lodge brothers. He cared about many of his ministers. He felt, as a decent man, real loyalty to his ‘servants’ and could not allow them to be brutally discarded by his all-powerful subject. The king’s kindness and consideration for others further enraged Bismarck. If the king wrote or spoke sharply to him, Bismarck collapsed into bed and was sometimes ill for weeks on end. Whatever William I meant by writing ‘How can you be so hypochondriac as to allow one single difference to mislead you into taking the extreme step!’ he had reason to complain. William could not have shown Bismarck more love and attention. Yet in conversation with Disraeli, in June of 1878, Bismarck had the nerve to complain of the horrible conduct of his Sovereign.15 This monologue astonished Disraeli because Bismarck said these things in public at a state dinner. They were almost certainly imaginary. I have not seen one word to substantiate the charge. Augusta certainly hated Bismarck and with reason, but she was sane. She knew that she had to live with the demonic Chancellor and his hypnotic power over husband. She sought moments when reconciliation without loss of face on his side might be possible. When in March 1873 Odo and Lady Emily Russell enjoyed the ‘unique favour’ of a visit from the Emperor and Empress to the British embassy for a private dinner, protocol required Bismarck to sit on the left of Her Imperial Majesty for an hour or so and to make polite conversation. He could not do it and refused the invitation. The greatest political genius of the nineteenth century lacked the courage and self-control to behave like the ‘nobleman’ he claimed to be in the presence of his sovereign and his sovereign lady. All he had to do was chat for an hour. The Iron Chancellor, who caused three great wars, feared a little old lady with a Saxon accent.
Furious and commanding he could be but Bismarck always managed to evade responsibility when things went wrong. He had lied to his mother from early childhood and continued to lie all his life. He lied to Johanna in 1851 that he had done nothing to gain the appointment to Frankfurt, when the evidence shows that he had intrigued for more than a year to get it. He always lied when he might be blamed for something. As Waldersee observed, ‘lying has become a habit with him.’ His memoirs twist and suppress the truth. He lied to the King about his relationship with Eulenburg during the crisis about local government 1872. His reply to Eulenburg’s letter contains falsehoods that anyone could spot. His preoccupation with military uniforms could be called another kind of lie. He had been a draft dodger in 1839–40 and lied about that, aided by the editors of the Collected Works, who removed the compromising correspondence from the record.
Finally he was guilty of yet another of the deadly sins: gluttony. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the vice of excessive eating. (One of the seven deadly sins.) Also rarely an instance of this.’ Gluttony may not be the most obvious of the deadly sins but it nearly killed Bismarck. Had Schweninger not given him the maternal care he needed in 1883 and reduced his intake, he would certainly have died of the combination of wrath and gluttony. If pride kills the soul, rage and gluttony ravage the body. Eating as a substitute for whatever Bismarck lacked represents yet again his utter unwillingness to exercise self-control over his appetites or to submit to the charge of another, even his personal physician. He was the great Bismarck from the age of 17 to the day he died, subject to none of the limitations which ordinary mortals must accept.
And then there were the virtues. The contradictions in his character that Hildegard Spitzemberg described earlier in this chapter apply to other aspects of Bismarck’s personality. He had many virtues. He was courteous to visitors, irrespective of status. He had both charm and warmth which overwhelmed Mary Motley and Lucius von Ballhausen when they first met him. The modest way the Bismarcks lived struck everybody as remarkable, and his irresistible sense of humour could win over enemies. Bismarck enjoyed the love and affection of his family and friends. The King, General Leopold von Gerlach, Roon, Motley, Moritz von Blankenburg, and countless others loved him and continued to do so in spite of his neglect and brutality to them. Marie von Thadden certainly loved him and so did his devoted wife, his sister, and brother. Nobody can read Bismarck’s letters to his sister without seeing how much love he could show. His successes in his career rested as much on the faithfulness, love, and loyalty of friends and patrons as well as subordinates such as Tiedemann and Keudell.
He could not, on the other hand, forgive and forget. Bismarck’s hostility to Queen Augusta concerned her politics. She was a Saxon princess, liberal in a sort of Coburgian way, friendly with Catholics, sympathetic to the middle states, and very intelligent. She threatened Bismarck because, as he constantly complained, she had the breakfast table at her disposal. There is little evidence that Augusta’s coterie of liberal advisers accomplished a thing or had much if any influence over the Emperor. He had his own firm views on most issues and seems not to have had a close enough relation to his wife to take her views too seriously. The real threat came from the Crown Prince and Crown Princess. They represented another Germany. Had William I done the decent thing and died at a reasonable age, at least young enough to allow Frederick and Victoria to rule for a few years, the conflict between the Crown and Chancellor would have ended Bismarck’s career smartly and finally.
Bismarck saw politics as struggle. When he talked about ‘politics as the art of the possible’, he meant that in a limited sense. He never considered compromise a satisfactory outcome. He had to win and destroy the opponents or lose and be destroyed himself. Very early in his career, he had a clash in the Prussian Landtag in which he showed his preference for conflict. On 27 January 1863, in one of his first speeches, he told the deputies his view of constitutionalism. ‘Constitutional life is a series of compromises. If these are frustrated, conflicts arise. Conflicts are questions of power, and whoever has power to hand, can go his own way.’ Maximilian Count von Schwerin cried out in amazement, ‘power comes before morality’.16 The Count missed the point; the issue was not morality but compromise. Whoever has power in a normal political system may win a round but must then continue the struggle to reach consensus. That was not Bismarck’s way. He set out to ‘beat them all’ and did. In a political system where principle stood at the centre of political activity, he had none but the naked exercise of his own power and the preservation of royal absolutism on which that power rested. If politics according to Bismarck were the ‘art of the possible’, but without compromise, what sort of art or craft was it? And to what end?
In international relations, it meant absolutely no emotional commitment to any of the actors. Diplomacy should, he believed, deal with realities, calculations of probabilities, assessing the inevitable missteps and sudden lurches by the other actors, states, and their statesmen. The chessboard could be overseen and it suited Bismarck’s peculiar genius for politics to maintain in his head multiple possible moves by adversaries. Since the international system of the nineteenth century rested on five (or six, if one counts Italy) great powers, Bismarck could deploy his ‘combinations, as Morier called them, with some assurance. He had his goals in mind and achieved them. He was and remained to the end master of the finely tuned game of diplomacy. He enjoyed it. In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless. He could outsmart and outplay the smartest people in other states and, even better, no Queen could get in his way. On occasion when he was ill or wallowing in self-pity, he considered the surrender of certain burdens of office. He never once suggested that anybody else should be Foreign Minister. Indeed, his miscalculation in 1890 arose in part because he believed that young Kaiser William II would never sacrifice his Chancellor’s thirty years of success and expertise.
Domestic politics posed a very different challenge. There were endless details, messy and insoluble problems, lots of different actors with conflicting interests, issues that had unforeseeable consequences, and the constant buzz of irritating criticism from tedious people in parliaments—two, the Reichstag and the Landtag, within a mile of each other. He had to know everything and decide everything but he was always ill, away for months and constantly impatient. Even more taxing was the fact that he had no very strong principles on practical matters and shifted his position all the time on issues of local government, trade, commercial regulations, legal codes, and the machinery of the modern state. He chose to complicate his life by stirring up the Kulturkampf and in due course provoking conservatives, liberals, progressives as well as the Guelphs, Poles, and Alsatians who sat in the Reichstag.
The Gerlachs were not wrong that principles matter in politics. Neither reality nor power has unequivocal or objective meanings. Human beings have values, faiths of various kinds, and preferences. The Bismarckian assumption that a master player can ‘game’ the system worked only to a point at which irrational emotions, violence, confusion, incompetence, began to mix themselves up with his plans. What is the purpose of the art of politics if not to serve some cause, to improve the conditions under which people have to live, to make societies, freer, more just and more humane or, with the Gerlachs more Christian? Bismarck practised his wizardry to preserve a semi-absolute monarchy and, when it suited him, he would preserve the rights of a narrow, frugal, fiercely reactionary Junker class, who hated all progress, liberalism, Jews, socialists, Catholics, democrats, and bankers. He differed from them only in his ruthlessness.
Bismarck used the German people, the King, the Gerlachs, in order to gain power but, as the German philosopher Kant warned, ‘Act so that you use humanity, as much as in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.’17 Bismarck ignored this both in his grand schemes and in his treatment of colleagues and subordinates. Count Albert von Pourtalès, a very distinguished diplomat in the Prussian Foreign Service, wrote to Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg: ‘Bismarck uses and misuses his party comrades. To him they are … just post horses with whom he travels to the next stop … From him I am saddled and ready to meet the blackest ingratitude.’18
Bismarck bequeathed to his successors an unstable structure of rule. The constitution of Prussia had been thrown together in the muddle of the revolution of 1848–9. Bismarck preserved it with its grossly unbalanced representation system. It continued to give the small class of Junker landlords a permanent veto on progress. Since Prussia amounted to three-quarters of the population, territory, and industrial power, it served as a surrogate for Germany as whole. Prussia’s House of Lords, gerrymandered and patched with difficulty, gave Hans von Kleist and his friends a place to dig in. The lower house with its three-class voting system did the rest. The fact that Germany never had its own army or Foreign Ministry (Prussia retained both) meant that the country went into the war of 1914 run by exactly the same families whose names make up the order of battle in 1870 and with the same impossible structure of rule.
Neither he nor his successors found a way to protect the semi-absolute power of the monarch in the unstable double legislative structure which Bismarck had cobbled together. The entire period from 1866 to 1890 is one long institutional tinkering—separate the Minister-President’s office from that of Reich Chancellor (1872–3 and 1892–4) and then reunite them because separation had not worked. Fuse the Reich and Prussian ministries and then decide against it; Bismarck fell over one of these jerry-built structures, the act of 1852 which, he believed, prevented the King/Emperor from consulting ministers directly without the Minister-President’s permission. In the Reich, there were no ministers, only so-called ‘State Secretaries’ who assisted the Chancellor but in theory had no independent power. Under Bismarck’s much weaker successors, the greater figures among the State Secretaries gained freedom to enjoy direct access to the Kaiser. Admiral Tirpitz, the powerful Reich Minister of the Naval Administration from 1897 to 1916, as an officer had an ‘immediate’ position, that is, direct access to the Emperor, and he used it. Without Bismarck, only Kaiser William II could coordinate policy and he could not or would not try.
In one of his most brilliant and fateful ploys, Bismarck announced in 1863 that the new Germany would have universal manhood suffrage. He used the people to undermine and tame the German princes, whose power and intransigence he grossly overestimated. On the other hand he underestimated the power of the people because he failed to see how the people had changed by the middle of the nineteenth century. He saw that the people had put Napoleon III into power and assumed that the masses were monarchical. But France was overwhelmingly agricultural throughout the nineteenth century, and Prussia/Germany was not. By the 1880s he could no longer prevent the growing forces of Social Democracy, the Catholic Centre, and bourgeois liberalism from representing their constituents. He had not used universal suffrage as anything other than a temporary tactic and it backfired. By the end of his career, no pro-government majority could be constructed without concessions, which Bismarck rejected.
In March of 1890 he explained to the State Ministry how he intended to provoke the Reichstag with reactionary legislation, to create a split between all the ‘enemies’ and the established order. He would then get the princes who made the Constitution of 1870 to unmake it and with that decision end the Reichstag with its irksome universal suffrage. To stay in power he would destroy the Reich of 1870, his greatest creation.
In 1863 when Bismarck used universal suffrage as a means to a political end, neither he nor anybody else could imagine that in three decades Germany would dominate central Europe with its heavy industries, its excellent technological institutes, its skilled, literate, and increasingly urban workforces, its mines and mills, its railroads, steamships, telephones and telegraphs, its thriving ports and harbours, a vigorous shipbuilding industry, its great trading companies and giant factories, its advanced medical facilities, its physics and chemistry and excellent engineering. It had the best army, the second largest navy, a huge trade surplus, and an archaic government of country squires. Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen warned that such a mix was not stable.
Mass society meant capitalism and capitalism brought its liberal ideology and the demand for free trade, free movement of people and goods, free access to crafts and professions, banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, and traders. Into this thriving new capitalist state, Jews emerged as its most adept practitioners and its most ambivalent symbols. Anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century became a surrogate for everything that the Junkers, churches, peasants, and artisans most feared and distrusted. From 1811, with von der Marwitz’s ‘Jew State’, to July 1918, and Colonel Bauer’s condemnation of Jews as draft-dodging, black marketeers,19 the Prussian Junker class regarded Jews as enemies. They represented the corrupt and dangerous fluidity of money, capitalism, and markets. They controlled a significant share of newspapers and pioneered the department stores.
By the late 1850s anti-Semitism was flourishing among the bourgeoisie as well as among the Junkers. Wagner published Jewishness in Music in 1850, and Gustav Freytag his anti-Semitic best-seller in 1855. By 1865 the main Protestant church newspaper could compare reformed Jews to vermin. The crash of 1873 and the resultant depression made these views respectable and Heinrich Treitschke, Germany’s most prominent historian, adopted and made them acceptable to the upper orders of society. The Reverend Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher, took them into court circles and converted the young Prince and Princess William of Prussia and General Alfred and Marie, Count and Countess von Waldersee. From top to bottom anti-Semitism flourished in Bismarck’s Germany.
In March 1890 the Kaiser had to replace Herbert Bismarck with a new Foreign Secretary. It said a lot about the wasteland Bismarck left behind that not one of the seven senior ambassadors had the necessary qualities. Friedrich Wilhelm Count zu Limburg-Stirum (1835–1912) clearly did but Phili Eulenburg rejected him, because, as he wrote to the Kaiser, Limburg Stirum ‘was of Jewish extraction on his mother’s side, which permeates his being’.20 Wilhelm II furiously upbraided Bismarck for ‘collusion’ with ‘Jesuits and Jews’.
Bismarck shared all of these prejudices and expressed them regularly. On the other hand, he clearly thought highly of Lassalle, got on well with Disraeli, Eduard Simon, and Ludwig Bamberger. He shared and often expressed loathing and disdain for Jews but he himself took no part in the extreme anti-Semitism of the Treitschke kind. On the other hand, he did great damage to Jews in Germany indirectly, because he took no steps to enforce the laws or protect Jewish citizens during the crisis of 1880. He used anti-Semitism to attack the Progressive party in order to destroy its ‘Jewish’ leadership.
Bismarck always destroyed ‘enemies’ and hence he let the anti-Semitic agitation of the 1870s and 1880s run because it would undermine Eduard Lasker and the left Liberals, whom Bismarck considered Jews, whether or not they actually were. A party which believed in free speech, free press, parliamentary immunity, separation of church and state, free markets, abolition of the death penalty, constitutional monarchy, representative cabinets, that is, the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, must be crushed as an ‘enemy of the Reich’ and as ‘Jewish’. As von der Marwitz claimed, such reforms were advocated by persons who wanted ‘den neuen Judenstaat’. For Bismarck the way to split the liberal ‘revolutionary’ movement, a typical example of Bismarckian paranoia, lay in anti-Semitism. If he could drive a wedge of anti-Semitism between the Jews and respectable German progressives, the Progressive Party would lack the leadership and cutting edge provided by the Jews. He used the same wedge technique by trying to slide the Vatican between the Catholic masses and the Centre Party. Hatred fired the energy with which he drove his wedge in both cases. Thus, when Lasker, the courageous, incorruptible leader of the Progressives, died in New York in 1884, Bismarck took his revenge on the ‘dumb Jewboy’,21 as he called Lasker, by sending back the message of condolence passed by the US House of Representatives.
Bismarck certainly did not create the anti-Semitism, which was universal at all levels of German society, but he used it to crush his enemies irrespective of the consequences. Anti-Semitism and its anti-liberal poison passed into the bloodstream of Germany to become virulent in the overheated atmosphere of the First World War and to become lethal in its aftermath. That too was a Bismarckian legacy, and it is richly ironic that Kaiser William dismissed Bismarck in March 1890 because he had been consorting ‘with Jesuits and Jews’.
By the 1890s, rather to his surprise, Bismarck had become genuinely popular. He drew huge crowds to hail him on his trip to Vienna in 1892 and enjoyed the homage of the German people. His image became an icon, a symbol of the German nation. When Bismarck died, as the poet Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’,
The currents of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.22
What did these admirers see in him? We all know the picture of the stern figure with his heavy eyebrows and moustache, in uniform, often with a glittering Pickelhaube on his head. He became the Iron Chancellor, the all-powerful, all-wise, genius-statesman, the man who unified Germany. His image hung in every schoolroom and over many a hearth. He embodied and manifested the greatness of Germany. The image became itself a burden to his successors. He made it impossible, as Caprivi wished, that Germany should get along with ‘normal people’. Germany had to have a genius-statesman as its ruler. Kaiser Wilhelm II outdid the Iron Chancellor in military display but failed the test. He could not control himself, still less the complicated ramshackle structure that Bismarck had left him. The First World War destroyed much of Bismarck’s Germany and defeat ended the monarchies in all the many German states. In 1925 the citizens of the unloved Weimar Republic elected Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg (1847–1934), a Prussian field marshal, to be their President. Hindenburg, born in Posen on 2 October 1847, had gone to the typical Kadettenanstalt, to which Junker nobility sent their sons, and become an officer in the 3rd Regiment of the Foot Guards. He led his troops at the Battle of Königgrätz, ‘which became for him all his life the greatest event in his own personal development and for the glory of Prussian arms’.23 He belonged to, and had grown up in, Bismarck’s world and looked it. He had the same frown, the same military severity and bulk. Historians of Germany often speak of him as an ‘ersatz Kaiser’ or a Kaiser substitute, but I think rather that he represented an ‘ersatz Bismarck’, a surrogate for the Iron Chancellor. It was Hindenburg, the last ruling Junker, who handed Adolf Hitler the office that Bismarck had created—that of Reich Chancellor. His only reservation typically had to do not so much with Hitler’s policy but his rank. Hitler had been only a corporal and Hindenburg found that fact deeply distasteful. Every wrinkle in the fossilized Prussian Field Marshall stirred at the degrading need to elevate that ‘Bohemian Corporal’ to Bismarck’s chair. Bismarck’s legacy passed through Hindenburg to the last genius-statesman that Germany produced, Adolf Hitler, and the legacy was thus linear and direct between Bismarck and Hitler.
Bismarck, the living human being; Bismarck, the genius-statesman; Bismarck the Iron Chancellor as icon, make up a complex legacy. Patriotic biographers left out the uncomfortable aspects of his actual life and the editors of documents omitted or censored them. A generation of conservative German historians exalted the wisdom, moderation, and vision of the statesman; the public and propagandists exalted the strong man, the essential German. The real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac, and misogynist, only appeared in biographies late in the twentieth century. What the three Bismarck images have in common as phenomena is the absence of the redeeming human virtues: kindness, generosity, compassion, humility, abstinence, patience, liberality, and tolerance. Bismarck the man, Bismarck the statesman, Bismarck the icon embodied none of those virtues.
There are deep ironies in the career of Otto von Bismarck: the civilian always in uniform, the hysterical hypochondriac as the symbol of iron consistency, the successes which become failures, the achievement of supreme power in a state too modern and too complex for him to run, the achievement of greater success than anybody in modern history which turned out to be a Faustian bargain. For twenty-eight years he crushed opposition, cowed cabinets, poured hatred, scorn, and anger on political opponents in public and private. It required courage of a high order to resist the Chancellor. Almost nobody dared. He smashed the possibility of responsible parliaments in 1878 when he used the two attempts to assassinate the Kaiser to destroy moderate bourgeois liberalism. He persecuted Catholics and Socialists. He respected no law and tolerated no opposition. His legacy in culture was literally nothing. He had no interest in the arts, never went to a museum, only read lyric poetry from his youth or escapist literature. He paid no attention to scientists or historians unless he could enlist them like Treitschke. He was the most supple political practitioner of the nineteenth century but his skill had no purpose other than to prop up an antiquated royal semi-absolutism—and to satisfy himself. The means were Olympian, the ends tawdry and pathetic. All that fuss to give Kaiser William II the ability to dislocate rational government and cause international unrest. Sir Edward Grey compared Germany to a huge battleship without a rudder. Bismarck arranged it that way; only he could steer it. He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state. He preferred to shoot workers rather than to listen to their complaints. He made his Junker friends into enemies and then ridiculed them. He mocked their Christian beliefs and offended their faith and values.
This biography began with Max Weber’s analysis of legitimacy which he set out in a lecture in 1918. In the same year, he wrote his ‘Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany’. Section 1 asks ‘what was the legacy of Bismarck?’ Max Weber, born under Bismarck in 1864, grew up in the home of committed National Liberals and knew the main figures in politics. He was both participant and observer. Weber began the section with Bismarck’s destruction of National Liberalism in 1878 and the resulting dilemma which he had created. Bismarck refused to govern with the Catholic Centre but could not govern without it. He then turned to the actual legacy of Bismarck’s long tenure of office:
He left a nation totally without political education … totally bereft of political will [italics in the original—JS] accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them. And further as a result of his improper exploitation of monarchical sentiment to conceal his own power politics in party battles, it had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of ‘monarchical government’.24
This crushing verdict by Germany’s greatest social scientist brings us full circle to the lecture room in Munich in October 1918 when Weber first explained the idea of charismatic leadership. Bismarck lacked the attributes that we normally associate with the charismatic leader. He moved no crowds at mass meetings and in parliament he roused his listeners more by insults and scorn than by overwhelming oratory, but he had that ‘demonic’ power that made him an irresistible political figure and a disastrous one.
The deepest and most impenetrable irony lies in Bismarck’s own personality.
He ruled Germany by making himself indispensable to a decent, kindly old man, who happened to be a king. He drew the King from his family and inserted himself between man and wife and between father and son. He worked his personal magic in that tiny space and his rule depended absolutely on the bond between William I and his chief minister and on nothing else. He stirred the hatred of the Queen and of the Crown Princess by his control of their husband and father-in-law. Both king and minister had terrible rows, burst into tears, and collapsed afterwards. In the end Bismarck got his way but paid a price in physical symptoms, sleeplessness, attacks of neuralgia, stomach problems, and anxiety symptoms. He could not live without the power that he extracted from the royal person but could not live with it either. For twenty-six years Bismarck and the King lived in this constant love/hate relationship. The King retained his good temper and serenity through all that time. Bismarck could not. The ultimate and terrible irony of Bismarck’s career lay in his powerlessness. Contemporaries called him a ‘dictator’ or a ‘despot’ but he knew better. Perhaps that is why he insisted that the only epitaph on his simple grave should tell the truth about his career: ‘A faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.’