Bismarck

A Political History

Edgar Feuchtwanger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317684312
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bismarck was arguably the most important figure in nineteenth-century European history after 1815. In this biography, Edgar Feuchtwanger reassesses Bismarck's significance as a historical figure. He traces his development from a typical Junker, a reactionary and conservative, into the so-called white revolutionary who recast European affairs more drastically than anyone since Napoleon. This second edition includes a new introduction, taking into account the most recent scholarship on Bismarck, which reflects on Bismarck's legacy in modern Germany, which is once again the European economic powerhouse for which Bismarck laid the foundations.

Feuchtwanger's lucid account demythologizes the German leader without demonising him. This book leaves the reader with a strongly-etched portrait of one of the decisive makers of the modern world.

1

EARLY DAYS

Prussia was Bismarck’s country and it was he who transformed it into the German Reich. Prussia was a country that had no geographical or ethnic identity and its shape and the composition of its population changed over the course of time. For a short period at the end of the eighteenth century it contained almost as many Polish speakers as German speakers. What gave it shape and identity was its ruling dynasty, the Hohenzollerns. They came from South Germany and their rule in what later became Prussia began in the march of Brandenburg in 1415. The Hohenzollerns established in the territories they acquired an ethos that impressed itself upon the peoples they ruled. It was this ethos more than anything else that constituted the Prussian identity. Three great Hohenzollern rulers following each other with hardly a break in the seventeenth and eighteenth century put Prussia on the map as a major European power. They were the Great Elector, who ruled from 1640 to 1688, Frederick William I, the soldier king, who ruled from 1713 to 1740, and, most famous of all, his son Frederick the Great, whose reign extended from 1740 to 1786.

There followed a period of decline, which ended in almost complete annihilation at the hands of Napoleon, in the battle of Jena in 1806. Prussia recovered from this low point largely through the work of some notable civil and military reformers, most of whom came from outside the country, men like Stein, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. ‘Travaillerpour le roi de Prusse’ was an old saying, indicating that the Hohenzollern rulers had always known how to attract hardworking military and civilian officials for little material reward, often from other parts of German-speaking Central Europe. They had also offered refuge to Huguenot exiles driven from their native country by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. French names became common in the Prussian aristocracy. This was what the Prussian ethos was all about: hard work for the common good, efficient, incorrupt administration and religious toleration, which was necessary in territories where there were Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. The dynasty itself was Calvinist. These were some of the positive aspects of Prussianism, but there were also plenty of negative ones. It was a military state and much of what was produced went to the maintenance of the army, with the aim of enabling the country ‘to punch above its weight’. The people were treated as a means to this end; they were, in Frederick the Great’s phrase, ‘the infilling substance of the state’. Such a state, even if ruled by an enlightened despot like Frederick, was no match for the highly motivated soldiers of the French Revolution. After the defeat of 1806 the reformers tried to remedy some of these shortcomings, by bringing in a greater measure of self-government and by replacing the mercenary army with a citizen army.

When Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 the Prussian reform era was ending, with most of the reforms left unfinished. The Junkers, the aristocracy to which the Bismarck family belonged, had resisted them to the best of their ability. But the battle of Waterloo, in which the Prussian armies were to play a considerable role, was only weeks away and Prussia was on the side of the victors. As a result she was to undergo yet another transformation, giving her control of large and potentially valuable territories in the Rhineland and in northern Saxony. In the late eighteenth century Prussia had almost more Polish than German subjects. After 1815 she became a mainly German power, the second European great power in the German Confederation that replaced the defunct Holy Roman empire. It was on these foundations that Bismarck, half a century later, established the Second German Reich.

*

Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen was the offspring of a marriage between a typical Prussian country Junker father and a mother who came from a non-Prussian family of academics. Otto’s maternal grandfather had opted to work for the king of Prussia as an official, had been a cabinet secretary to Frederick the Great and an influential cabinet counsellor under his two successors, Frederick William II and III. He had been a servant of monarchical absolutism, but he was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. The Bismarck family had been landowners in the march of Brandenburg since at least the fourteenth century. At a moment in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when his king caused him particular annoyance, Otto recalled how the Suabian Hohenzollerns had made his sixteenth-century ancestors move from Burgstall, north of Magdeburg and west of the Elbe, to Schönhausen, for no other reason than that they liked to hunt around Burgstall. But the Bismarcks were not rebellious and service in the Prussian armies became normal for them by the eighteenth century, as it did for many Junker families. Frederick William I, the soldier king, in an instruction to his successor, mentioned the Bismarcks among others as a family that he had found disobedient. Bismarck was always very conscious that he belonged to a class that had lorded it over the peasants since time immemorial and that the state building of the Hohenzollerns had to rest on a compromise with the interests of his class. The nobility in the old provinces of Prussia were the irreducible building blocks of the Prussian state. The Hohenzollerns had the knack, nevertheless, of turning the narrow and selfish concerns of their landowning class into loyalty to themselves and to the state they were building up. The Junkers turned into a service aristocracy, the backbone of the Prussian military state. Otto’s great-grandfather and grandfather fought for Frederick the Great. His father Ferdinand did not serve long in the army and returned to manage his estates. Besides Schönhausen, on the Elbe, they had three estates in Pomerania, in the area north-east of Stettin (now Szczecin) known in German as Hinterpommern, the Pomerania of the back of beyond, and generally considered the most backward region of the old Prussian provinces.

Otto’s mother Wilhelmine Mencken married into this archetypal squirearchical family at the age of seventeen, in 1806. Her father had died five years earlier, but she remained linked to the court and was a playmate of the later Frederick William IV. Coming from an influential family at the hub of affairs, she resented being buried away in the country. Her husband was amiable and easy-going and prepared to take her advice on important family decisions, though in dealing with his peasants he behaved like a mini-king. She was intensely ambitious for her two surviving sons and determined that they should not lead the undistinguished lives of country squires. Reform of the school and university system was a central feature of the Prussian renaissance after Jena. In 1810 Wilhelm von Humboldt had founded the new University of Berlin and thereby took a big step towards making the Prussian and German university system prestigious throughout the world. Wilhelmine Mencken wanted her sons to be highly educated and follow in the footsteps of her distinguished family of academics and public servants. She was a bluestocking and somewhat lacking in maternal warmth. Thus it came about that both her sons were sent away to school, Otto, the younger, at the early age of six, when it would have been more usual to have them privately educated by a tutor in preparation for joining the public education system at a later stage. Otto, like his elder brother Bernhard, was sent to the Plamann Institute in Berlin, a school once dedicated to the progressive principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, but by the time the young Bismarck went there, it hardly deviated from the conventional groove of authoritarian learning and discipline. In adult life Bismarck often compared it to a penal institution, but this was an exaggeration. He claimed that he resented the fate his mother had imposed on him, and that even in the holidays she was often not there to look after him because she was taking the waters for her weak health. In pursuit of dry learning she had deprived him of the joys of a childhood spent in the countryside. Looking out of a window of the Plamann Institute, he found that the sight of a team of oxen ploughing made him weep with longing, so he claimed, for Kniephof, the Bismarck estate in Pomerania, the paradise from which he had been separated.

When he was the all-powerful chancellor it became a habit for Bismarck to spend long periods on the country estates a grateful nation had provided for him and to absent himself, sometimes for diplomatic reasons, from Berlin. He enjoyed flirting with the idea that he might retire to the simple life of a country gentleman, to which he had been born. Yet it would never have suited him, and when for a time in his mid- and late twenties he did manage the Bismarck estates he grew restless. His mother may have occasioned him much unhappiness in his youth, but by the course she marked out for him she steeled his ambition to impose himself upon the world. In an often-quoted remark he once said he wanted to ‘make his own music, as he saw fit, or none’. He could not rest until he fulfilled this ambition and he could not desist from ‘making his own music’ until he died. After leaving the Plamann Institute he went from 1827 to 1832 to two well-known Berlin secondary schools. During this time he lived in the Berlin flat of his family, together with his uncle General Friedrich von Bismarck. As an adolescent he got to know life in socially and politically influential circles in the capital and heard the talk of people who were close to the centres of power.

*

Otto was too averse to discipline and conformity to have made a good pupil and student, despite his high intelligence. When at the age of seventeen the time had come for him to go to university he first went to Göttingen, which lay outside Prussia in Hanover, still linked to the British crown, and later to Berlin. Göttingen and Berlin had distinguished professors, whose names are still remembered, for instance Dahlmann, one of the Göttingen Seven, who were to be dismissed in 1837 by the newly enthroned king of Hanover for their loyalty to the constitution. In Berlin there was the famous jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and Hegel had taught there up to his death in 1831. Bismarck, who, because a career in the public service was intended for him, studied law, made scarcely any use of the available opportunities. The only professor whose lectures he attended with some regularity in Göttingen was Arnold Heeren, then a widely renowned historian. Heeren made much of the influence of material conditions, the processes of wealth creation, in all periods of history, and stressed the influence of trade and economic considerations on the relations between states. This made a lasting impact on Bismarck and may have helped him later to appreciate the importance of economic forces and of economically rising social classes.

Otherwise Bismarck led the life of a heavy-drinking, hard-fighting, whoring young nobleman let off the leash. He was tall and physically imposing, dressed extravagantly and went around with a large dog. He did not join a Burschenschaft, one of the politically active student associations, which were a major factor in keeping German national consciousness alive after 1815. The Burschenschaften were about to come together in the Hambach meeting of 1832, one of the landmarks in the liberal, national struggle against the conservative regime associated with the Holy Alliance and Metternich. The Burschenschaften did not allow duelling and it would not have sat well with Bismarck’s aristocratic self-consciousness to have joined them. In the Corps Hannovera, which he did join, he fought twenty-five duels in the space of three terms. In letters to a student friend, Scharlach, he affects a cynical, hardbitten, anti-intellectual tone: ‘If you want to read this letter in the spirit in which it is written, you must drink a bottle of Madeira first. I would apologize for my long silence if you were not so well acquainted with my inborn repugnance to ink and if you did not know that in Göttingen I prefer to drink two bottles of hock rather than write a letter, and that the sight of a pen gives me convulsions.’¹

This was not all there was to Bismarck even in his student days. His three closest friends were outsiders in this environment. They were the American John Lothrop Motley, later the distinguished historian of the Dutch Republic, and two brothers from the Baltic German aristocracy, Counts Hermann and Alexander von Keyserling. Alexander, whom he got to know in Berlin, was a scholarly figure, who, like Motley, remained a lifelong friend. From them we learn of a very different side of Bismarck, long discussions on religion, politics and literary explorations, Byron, Shakespeare, Heine and many others. Bismarck knew English well and often used English quotations and phrases in his correspondence and speeches. Heine’s ironical, ambivalent writings were close to his own style of expression. He read widely, but not systematically. He dipped into books and more often than not cast them aside, if he failed to find what he wanted. To the world he might look like the typical Junker, but he wrote of the life of his social equals in the same sharply perceptive, cynical, witty tone that he affected in all his letters. Again to Scharlach he wrote in 1833 that should he visit him in Kniephof ten years hence he would find him as a reserve officer run to fat, who regards Jews and Frenchmen with repugnance and takes it out on his dogs and his servants when his wife becomes the domestic tyrant, and so on in similar vein. Alexander Keyserling remembers him as saying ‘a constitution is inevitable, this is the way to external honours, inwardly one must be pious.’² A typical Junker backwoodsman would not have thought a constitution inevitable. He himself remembered in the 1860s a bet that there would be a united Germany in twenty years. No doubt he thought it would be under the king of Prussia, a very different expectation from that entertained by the Burschenschaften. Motley and Keyserling, from their very different backgrounds, were highly critical of the hidebound regimented atmosphere of Prussia and through them Bismarck must have learnt how Prussia was viewed by more liberal outsiders. Motley was a republican, and Bismarck professed to be republican, though in theory rather than practice. He was certainly an unbeliever and had given up saying his prayers at the age of sixteen. In 1839 Motley published a youthful novel, Morton’s Hope, in which appears a young nobleman probably modelled on Bismarck: Otto von Rabenmark is an exuberant, daredevil young student seeking notoriety among his contemporaries. But at home he is rational, widely read, highly gifted, conscious that his public appearance is role-playing.

Bismarck passed the exams to become a Prussian official and spent a period as a young official in Aachen in the summer of 1836. It was a life he disliked from the beginning; ‘the longest title and the most splendid decoration in Germany will not compensate me for the shrivelled outlook, which is the result of such a life’, he wrote. Contempt for bureaucracy accompanied him all his life, though as the all-powerful minister he later knew well how to use it. The Junker in him had the same ambivalent feeling towards the bureaucratic Prussian state as he had to the ruling Hohenzollerns. He would have liked to become a diplomat, but when he told Ancillon, the Prussian foreign minister, of his ambition, he was informed that Prussian country Junkers lacked the wider horizons to do well in the diplomatic service. In Aachen he had little time for the native bourgeois elite – he called it ‘the native Canaille‘ – and sought the company of the many foreign, mostly aristocratic and English visitors who came to this then fashionable spa. Thus he fell successively in love with two young Englishwomen, first a Miss Laura Russell, niece of the duke of Cleveland, and then more seriously with Isabella Loraine-Smith, the daughter of a well-connected and affluent Leicestershire parson.

From his correspondence with his brother Bernhard, some of it revealed only within the last thirty years, it appears that he was much pleased with his entrée into this aristocratic English circle. Its wider horizons enabled him to cast off his self-image of a Pomeranian backwoodsman. His boundless pride and highly vulnerable self-esteem took a knock when he heard rumours that the current duchess of Cleveland was, in a previous incarnation, a high-class prostitute and that Laura Russell might be the off-spring of one of her liaisons. He wrote to his brother that among the English party he might be pointed out through a looking glass: ‘… look there, that tall monster, that is the silly German baron, whom they have caught in the woods, with his pipe and his seal-ring’.³ With Isabella Loraine-Smith it became an even more consuming passion and he followed her and her family around Europe for much of the year 1837, got engaged and piled up more debts. He extended his original leave of absence from his post in Aachen from a fortnight to many months. Finally it all broke up. In his usual ironical-cynical style he told his friend Scharlach, many years later in 1845: ‘… after two months’ possession my conquest was taken from me by a colonel aged 50, with 4 horses and an income of 15,000 Reichsthaler. Poor in my purse, sick in my heart, I returned home to Pomerania.’⁴ Isabella did not marry the colonel either, but a banker from Harrow. It is intriguing to speculate what would have happened had she married Bismarck.

He never returned to his post in Aachen and obtained a transfer to Potsdam. His boss in Aachen, Count Arnim-Boitzenburg, later a minister, wrote to him welcoming his decision to return to ‘more arduous official duties … for which you strove in vain under the prevailing social circumstances in Aachen’.⁵ He worked for five months in Potsdam, then reluctantly did his army service, having tried to avoid it by claiming a weakness in his right arm. Some years earlier, when his mother saw how little serious study agreed with him, she suggested a career in the army, but he found the idea abhorrent, strange for one who was to lead the Prussian military monarchy to a peak of power. But, as a young man, official service, civil or military, was clearly not for him. All the time he was seriously embarrassed by his debts. In the autumn of 1838 he decided to leave the public service and devote himself to the management of the family estates. He moved to Kniephof in the spring of 1839. He was barely twenty-four and there had already been many false starts in his life. It was perhaps fortunate that his mother died in January 1839, for she must have been severely disappointed in him. In an often quoted letter to a cousin, which was also intended for other members of the family, he justified his decision to give up a public career.^6...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chronology
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Early days
• 2 Entry into politics
• 3 Diplomat with a difference
• 4 Minister in waiting
• 5 Prime minister
• 6 First triumph
• 7 Fratricidal war
• 8 High noon
• 9 Imperial chancellor
• 10 Turn to the right
• 11 Power prolonged
• 12 Fall and resentful retirement
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index