Otto von Bismarck

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  Bismarck and the German Empire

  1871–1918

  • Lynn Abrams(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Otto von Bismarck was appointed prime minister of Prussia in September 1862. He was born on All Fools’ Day in 1815, the son of a Prussian Junker (member of the lesser nobility) and a mother from a successful family of civil servants. His background, combining liberal intellectualism on his mother’s side and traditional Prussian noble values from his father, is said to have gifted the young Bismarck a breadth of vision and an ability to understand diverse attitudes and ambitions. He was well educated in Berlin, a city he was said to hate, and after university in Göttingen he embarked upon a career as a civil servant. When he was still only 24 years old he resigned his post and returned home to the family estate in Pomerania, but boredom soon found him engaging in Prussian politics. From 1851, in his position as Prussian representative to the Federal Diet of the Confederation in Frankfurt, he fought to maintain Prussian supremacy in the face of the Austrian challenge. In 1859 he was moved to a new diplomatic posting in St Petersburg but he continued to champion the cause of Prussia within the Confederation. Until 1860, as a diplomat, Bismarck had been at the margins of power, but a constitutional crisis in Prussia, which saw open conflict between the sovereign and the parliament over the issue of the reorganization of the army, resulted in the recall of Bismarck from his then posting in Paris to head a new cabinet. Between 1862 and 1866 Bismarck ruled Prussia unconstitutionally, ignoring the parliament, illegally raising the necessary finance by taxation and pushing through the army reforms. In his new position as prime minister of Prussia, Bismarck sought to enhance the position of Prussia at every available opportunity. Just nine years later he had achieved his aim of securing Prussia’s position within Germany and setting her on the path of economic success and political dominance.

  Historians may disagree about Bismarck’s intentions, about his achievements and failures and his legacy, but few would deny the extent of his impact on German politics and the shape of the German Empire. This acceptance of the centrality of one man has prompted numerous biographical studies and personality assessments in an attempt to probe beneath the pugnacious façade. In his time as Prussian prime minister and German chancellor he created a ‘charismatic myth’ of indispensability which even present-day historians have found difficult to shake off, with Hans-Ulrich Wehler recently describing Bismarck as a charismatic leader with ‘devoted followers’, who inspired ‘fanatic enthusiasm’ and who hung on to power by manufacturing and then solving crises.23 As Katherine Lerman has stated, Bismarck’s ‘exceptional status’ is not in doubt, whether one judges him positively as a clever tactician or – more likely – critically as a man who saddled the new state with an immense problem.24 The negative view of Bismarck as an arch-manipulator presiding over a ‘Bonapartist dictatorial regime’ is today regarded as too trite a description of the man and his system, and historians are more apt to find some agreement with Bismarck’s own assessment of his place in German history when he said ‘I, at least, am not so presumptuous to believe that history can be made by the likes of us. It is my task to observe history’s currents and to steer my ship within them. I cannot guide the currents themselves, let alone create them.’25

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  The Origins of the First World War

  • Ruth Henig(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The rise of German power after 1870, the corresponding relative decline of France particularly in terms of economic strength and size of population, the increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire and the unending conflicts between the two ramshackle empires of eastern Europe, Austria-Hungary and Russia, all contributed to a lengthy period of unsettled and at times stormy international diplomacy. Many European statesmen of the 1870s and 1880s expected a major war to break out in the near future; indeed, so concerned was Bismarck about this possibility that he concentrated a large part of his considerable abilities after 1871 on the establishment of a complicated diplomatic network of understandings which would secure European peace and stability. In the short term he was successful, but as we shall see, his policies had long-term repercussions which helped to undermine the post-1871 European settlement he had done so much to establish.

  Bismarck’s legacy

  The unification of Germany and establishment of the German Empire in 1871 clearly altered the distribution of power within Europe and ushered in a new international order. But what was most significant about the new German Empire was its internal power structure and the circumstances in which it was established. The federation of German states which made up the new united Germany was dominated by Prussia. The constitution was carefully drawn up to maximize Prussian power and Prussian interests. And within Prussia social control and political power had traditionally been exercised, and continued to be exercised, by the Junkers, a class of nobility who owned large landed estates and operated within a neo-feudal social structure. They owed military and political allegiance to the Prussian king—who became after 1871 the German Kaiser— and ruled autocratically over the classes beneath them. Bismarck himself came from a prominent Junker family, and according to A.J.P.Taylor his foreign policy was ‘always shaped by “Junker” needs’. One could indeed argue that Bismarck’s Junker background influenced all his policies, especially after he became Chancellor in the new united Germany in 1871. Bismarck sought to preserve the traditional Prussian social and political order and to enshrine it in the new German Empire. The forces released by industrialization and urbanization could not be allowed to undermine Junker

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  The German Public Mind in the Nineteenth Century

  Volume 3 A Social History of German Political Sentiments, Aspirations and Ideas

  • Frederick Hertz, Frank Eyck, Eric Northcott(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22

  THE RISE OF BISMARCK

  THE PATH TO POWER

  Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) had occupied himself with politics early on, but neither his civil service career nor his activity in four parliaments appealed to him, and he turned to the management of his estates. His speeches in the Prussian Assembly and the Erfurt Parliament showed him to be a pronounced Junker, though of quite a special kind, a monarchist but no supporter of absolutism, and a man who placed being a Prussian above being a German. By nature passionate, he thirsted for struggle, action and power, and with all this he had an extraordinary ability to judge men and political situations which was quite uninfluenced by any party slogans and sprang above all from his own observations and a wide study of history. For him, nature and history were filled with conflict; without conflict there was no life. The State had to defend its vital interests and extend its power in order to escape eclipse. Yet he by no means advocated the pursuit of unlimited power for the State, either at home or abroad. For every state nature and history had laid down certain limits which must not be overstepped. Despite his own liking for power politics and the extraordinarily great qualities which he could command in their prosecution, he was by no means inclined to overestimate the political possibilities open to him. He was equally far removed from the outlook which could seek to resuscitate a superannuated past as he was from the striving after goals which might lie in the remote future. For him politics was the art of the possible and his acumen, the lessons he had drawn from history and his instinct told him what was possible. In the uncertainty which is inseparably linked with politics he always had several options open and the corresponding means in readiness.

  Even under Frederick William IV, Bismarck could have become a minister, but he felt the time was not yet ripe. In 1851 he became Prussian delegate to the Bundestag in Frankfurt, in 1859 Ambassador in St Petersburg and, in 1862, in Paris. All these posts afforded him an excellent training for the conflicts to come. In Frankfurt he considered it his prime task to lessen Austria’s dominance in Germany. His aim was first to secure for Prussia equality of status, and then, step by step, supremacy. For tactical reasons he sought to prevent for the time being any evolution of the Bund

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  Bismarck And The German Empire

  • Dr. Erich Eyck(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Normanby Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER IV—BISMARCK AS IMPERIAL CHANCELLOR

  THE twenty years beginning with the foundation of the German Empire in January 1871 and ending with Bismarck’s dismissal by William II in March 1890, are known to historians as the “Age of Bismarck”, for, indeed, during these years he was the centre not only of German but of European politics. The majority of the German people looked at him as the hero of national unity, but statesmen in all other capitals of Europe considered him not only the unrivalled master of their craft, but the most important factor in every political calculation and combination. Nowhere was there a man bold enough to dispute his superiority, whether in London or St. Petersburg, let alone Paris or Vienna. Everywhere the leading statesmen, Disraeli or Gortchakoff, Andrassy or Thiers, looked to Berlin and to the Wilhelmstrasse or even to Varzin or Friedrichsruh, should the Chancellor happen to be on his estates, far from his office. In the seventies, in particular, Bismarck’s position was comparable only to that of Napoleon I during the Congress of Erfurt in 1808, when the Czar of Russia and all the German princes gathered round to do him homage. But while Napoleon continued to plunge into fresh wars, Bismarck never drew the sword again after defeating France. A few years after Erfurt Napoleon I was driven from his throne and from France; Bismarck remained in power for almost twenty years and his overthrow was due not to a foreign enemy but to his own Emperor.

  The years from 1871 to 1890 stand out in sharp contrast to the first period of Bismarck’s administration from 1862 to 1870. In this initial period he waged three wars, in 1864, 1866, and 1870, but in the later period not one. This, of course, by no means implies that his views on the admissibility of war as a means of solving political problems had changed. Before and after 1870 he considered military strength the real criterion of the importance of a state. But he did not wish to jeopardize in a new war what he had won for Prussia and Germany in three previous wars. In the earlier period he had changed the map of Europe completely. He had not only enhanced Prussia enormously and united the different German states under the Prussian crown, but he had also annexed to Germany two provinces which had belonged to France for two centuries and the inhabitants of which had most unwillingly become German subjects. Bismarck believed that Germany had now got all the territory that was good for her, that she was saturiert

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  History of the German Empire

  • William Dawson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Ozymandias Press

    (Publisher)

  A change came in the relations of the two Powers when there appeared in the Diet in 1851, first as understudy to the Prussian envoy, Herr von Rochow (May 11th), then as plenipotentiary (July 15th), Otto von Bismarck. In him Prussia may be said to have recovered her lost will. A deputy in the Prussian United Diet of 1847, in the Prussian Diet of 1849, and in the German Parliament of Erfurt in 1850, and a King’s man by descent and predilection, Bismarck very early seemed to be, marked out for distinction in public life. In his own circles he was already spoken of as one of the coming men of the political world. He had first drawn upon himself the King’s favourable notice in 1847 by his ultra-royalist utterances as a member of the United Diet. Since then his opinion had been, held in high regard both by his Sovereign and the Government, and during the events which preceded Olmütz he had been called into counsel in Berlin. His knowledge of human nature, his geniality (when occasion required it), native shrewdness, and mother-wit, and above all his dominating will, born on the fertile soil of the feudal Mark of Brandenburg, singularly fitted him to be the representative at the Federal Diet of a Government which for the present had no hope of asserting its rightful place and gaining its ends save by judicious diplomacy and careful handling of men.

  Only the Liberals saw his emergence from comparative obscurity with apprehension. His short career as a parliamentary deputy had justly given him the reputation of a typical reactionary, uncompromising in his attachment to the principle of monarchy by the grace of God and hostile to any concession to the idea of popular sovereignty. A man who could publicly confess that for him “Prussia’s honour meant her abstinence from any shameful union with democracy” was not likely to enjoy the confidence of a party which had just tried conclusions with autocracy and had failed in the encounter.

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  German Foreign Policy from Bismarck to Adenauer

  • Klaus Hilderbrand(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  furor teutonicus had been provided as far back as 1848–50 when the broad liberal group in the Paulskirche made extensive territorial demands in Europe; these sentiments, which had since been kept in check by Bismarck, might then have been unleashed on the continent in full force.

  Bismarck’s style of government, much disliked in Great Britain, was to rule together with the parliament and the king, to balance the domestic political weight of each against the other, and thus to win a high degree of authority for himself He refused, on grounds of ideological and political principle, to allow the people to participate at all in decisions on foreign policy. However, there were also significant practical reasons for his conduct. By retaining control of foreign policy, he could ignore demands within Germany for impetuous moves to achieve unification by force against the rest of Europe. Instead, Bismarck continued to seek unification with more circumspection, in concert with Europe where this remained possible. To this extent, the foreign policy and international circumstances of Prussia, and later of Prussia-Germany, almost demanded a monarchical-constitutional form of government of the kind practised by Bismarck. His domestic policies made him the object of considerable mistrust in Britain. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s moderation in foreign affairs was convincingly demonstrated to Britain in the peace treaties of Nikolsburg and Prague in 1866. From an international perspective, this policy of moderation was generally beneficial to both Britain and Europe.

  Once again, Bismarck had opposed disarmament. Yet he was certainly not endangering peace more than would have been the case if he had allied himself with the demands of the liberals. In Prussia, the national liberals continued to advocate disarmament, but also to exploit nationalist sentiment, calling for the unification of Germany by force in a war against France. Lord Clarendon’s disarmament diplomacy took insufficient account of the compatibility between the political objectives of Britain and Prussia, despite the obvious geopolitical, historical and ideological differences between them. This compatibility was accentuated by Bismarck’s desire to move towards German unification in harmony with Great Britain and Europe. In the longer term, potential dangers began to emerge during the disarmament debate, arising from the ideological and political contrast between the two states. There was a possibility that Prussia-Germany would one day come to be regarded as the power in Europe which clung to unproductive armaments and thus forced other states to bear useless costs. However, diplomatic discretion was still preventing such reactions, though at the conclusion of his letter Lord Clarendon indicated the possibility as a danger for Prussia. For the time being, the British statesman exercised his skill and intelligence to avoid publicity and prevent the danger becoming acute; he was honestly concerned with disarmament itself, not the propaganda effect which could lead all too easily to a general European conflagration.

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  From Vienna to Versailles

  • L.C.B. Seaman(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Like considerations apply to his famous observation about blood and iron. As an exercise in effective literary antithesis it is superb; not votes and debates, but blood and iron. But to jump from admiration of the phrase to the conclusion that it adequately describes Bismarck’s methods is to forget that he said it as part of a vigorous political speech condemning the opposition of the Prussian Liberals to the increased army estimates. It is also to commit a major error of historical interpretation. From a technical point of view the distinctive achievement of Bismarck is that few statesmen in modern history have achieved such a revolution in the balance of forces in Europe with such an economy of blood and iron. The military successes of Prussia from 1864 to 1871 were brought about under the leadership of a civilian minded minister who, like Clemenceau, believed that war was too serious a business to be left to the soldiers. Bismarck did not have two characters, a warlike aggressive one before 1871 and a peaceful defensive one after 1871. He had a cautious, calculating preference for limited objectives from start to finish. He used the army when it became impossible to achieve his diplomatic purposes without it; when diplomacy alone would suffice, he merely used the army as a modern headmaster is supposed to use the cane in his study—as a threat.

  The notion that all Bismarck’s predecessors were incompetent fools is another of Bismarck’s exaggerations. They faced extreme risks in any attempt to assert Prussian predominance in Germany. First, there was the existence of the Holy Alliance, to whose principles Nicholas I rigidly adhered in German affairs. To attempt to push Prussian claims against Austria by means of war at any time before 1853 would have meant a war against Russia as well. This is shown by the persistent opposition of Nicholas to the various schemes of Frederick William IV and his advisers between 1848 and 1851. Second, there was the situation in Germany itself. To fight Austria would be to espouse the cause of German Liberalism in the eyes, not only of the Czar, but also of German Liberals: and Prussia could not see how to fight a revolutionary war without being revolutionized herself. Prussia’s position was the reverse of that of Piedmont in Italy. Piedmont’s army was the creation of Liberalism. Prussia’s army was the enemy of Liberalism, was the dominant social force in the state, and accepted the Liberal constitution of 1848 as grudgingly and as insincerely as the German army accepted the Weimar Constitution after 1919. In short, before 1853, a Prussian attempt to dominate even northern Germany would have involved a war against Austria, against Russia and against the Germans. Prussia declined the risk; for the avoidance of risk had been the historic tradition of Prussian policy from the days of the Great Elector onwards.

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  Infamous Speeches

  From Robespierre to Osama bin Laden

  • Bob Blaisdell, Bob Blaisdell(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  Otto von Bismarck

  Chancellor of the German Empire

  “A Plea for Imperial Armament” (“We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world!”) Reichstag, Berlin February 6, 1888

  Otto Edward Leopold, Prince von Bismarck-Schonhausen (1815–1898) was a Prussian reactionary and royalist. A clever diplomat and political chess-player, he believed nevertheless in the superior effectiveness of “iron and blood.” Having helped bring about the unification of Germany in 1870 after the Franco-Prussian War, he was given the title “Prince” and named the Imperial Chancellor of the German Empire, an office he held until 1890. As Chancellor, he attempted to curb papal influence by placing restrictions on Roman Catholics, which led to the emigration of thousands of citizens. During his chancellorship, Germany partook in the detestable “Scramble for Africa.” He continually prepared Germany for war, but in the midst of the 1888 Bulgarian Crisis, made it clear he preferred to participate in or provoke only the ones it could win: “It is not fear which makes us peaceable, but the consciousness of our strength—the consciousness that if we were attacked at the most unfavorable time, we are strong enough for defense and for keeping in view the possibility of leaving it to the providence of God to remove in the meantime the necessity for war.”

   

  If I rise to speak today it is not to urge on your acceptance the measure the President has mentioned (the army appropriation). I do not feel anxious about its adoption, and I do not believe that I can do anything to increase the majority by which it will be adopted—by which it is all-important at home and abroad that it should be adopted. Gentlemen of all parties have made up their minds how they will vote and I have the fullest confidence in the German Reichstag that it will restore our armament to the height from which we reduced it in the period between 1867 and 1882; and this not with respect to the conditions of the moment, not with regard to the apprehensions which may excite the stock exchanges and the mind of the public; but with a considerate regard for the general condition of Europe. In speaking, I will have more to say of this than of the immediate question.

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  Germany in the Age of Bismarck

  • W. M. Simon(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The impartial observer, even without the light of hindsight and disregarding the merits of Bismarck’s successors who dropped the Reinsurance Treaty, may be inclined to think that Bismarck’s diplomatic webs were getting both so speculative that they were unlikely to stand any strain put upon them and so intricate that he was liable to be caught up in them himself. There may, after all, even in diplomacy be such a thing as being too clever by half. Was Bismarck not by now in the position of devising ever more ingenious expedients for dealing with ever more desperate situations? He thought he was playing a canny multiple game of chess, but his opponents were making the moves expected of them less and less often. In this particular case, it was not much more than wishful thinking to suppose that Russia would go down the ‘blind alley to Constantinople’. The specific constellation into which the Reinsurance Treaty fitted—the Mediterranean Agreements—was in any event a temporary one. Bismarck would no doubt retort that the Reinsurance Treaty itself, equally, was a temporary stratagem; but it was capable of conjuring up ghosts that might (at best) take a long time to exorcize. Meanwhile it might not even prevent Russia from moving toward an alliance with France. Bismarck himself admitted as much when he attempted to revive the project of a British alliance, this time by a public treaty to deter the French from the idea of making war against Germany; but Lord Salisbury, though fundamentally pro-German and afraid of French domination of the Continent, no longer had the confidence in Bismarck that he had placed in the ‘honest broker’ of the Congress of Berlin. This is at any rate one measure of the success of Bismarck’s diplomacy.

  Yet the question must be asked whether, given his aim, and then the fait accompli, of a unified and independent great power in the middle of Europe, Bismarck had in fact any choice. Was he not condemned, having once upset the European balance of power, to walk a tightrope on which sooner or later he would lose his own balance? Is he not rather to be admired for staying on it so long, for keeping a cool head and refusing to be distracted by the clowns below? If that is so, then criticism of Bismarck’s foreign as well as of his domestic policy must properly be directed not at his means but at his ends, in other words at the creation of a Prussian-dominated, tightly federated Germany in the first place. But here too, as in the area of domestic policy, it is difficult to envisage a more attractive alternative. Such advocates of a loose confederation including Austria as Constantin Frantz (Doc. 25 ) had ideas of their own in the area of power politics. A Central European federation (Mitteleuropa) focused on the Danube would have been as vulnerable militarily as Bismarckian Germany, if not more so, and would therefore have needed defence, particularly against Russia.

  The fact remains, however, that Bismarck set the tone for the deteriorating quality of diplomacy, as well as for the growing thicket of international suspicion, during his period in office. Although the chickens did not come home to roost until afterwards, still it was Bismarck who had hatched them.

  Passage contains an image

  8Bismarck’s last years in power

  BISMARCK ’S

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  Blood and Iron

  Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its Founder, Bismarck

  • John Hubert Greusel(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Nor am I excepting the conquests of love itself, from time immemorial presented as a token of man’s romantic, softer side. For, if the hero does not “save” the heroine from the villain, to take her for himself, then for whom does he save her?

  ¶ The Bismarck struggle and the Bismarck triumph are as old as history—and as new as the career of the man of today who has achieved his heart’s desire.

  The empire-maker Bismarck had his way because he was strong enough to have his way, and while cruelties in various forms, for the ends of statecraft, coexisted in him with many fine qualities, after all that simply means that he was a human being with impulses of various kinds—good and less good—in one heart. It is also an undeniable fact that as late as 1862 Bismarck was by the common crowd in Prussia hated and feared, regarded as Germany’s ogre of disaster.

  ¶ Here then is the whole thing in a nutshell: His strong conservative, not to say reactionary, sentiments did not blind him to the fact that he could do nothing without the “people,” whom politically he ignored in so far as their fitness for constructive government was concerned; but it was the “people,” and the “people” only, who could bring United Germany.

  He realized the present impracticability of such a Union as he had in mind for his master, the King of Prussia; that to urge it too soon would simply bring a new revolution, and God knows there had been enough blood-letting for the sake of power in and around Prussia for lo! these one hundred years gone by.

  ¶ The only thing for him to do, then, was to keep his ambition to himself and his own crowd, and to bide his time to strike—for time makes all things right for him who can wait. And at waiting and at concealing Bismarck was past master. While usually figured as a blunt, bold, tyrannical man, there was also a side of inscrutable reticence.

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  A History of Germany, 1800 to the Present

  • William Carr, David Wetzel(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  5 The Development of the Bismarckian Empire, 1871–90

  To the very end of its existence in 1918 the German Empire bore the deep imprint of its origins in military victory. The French chose the fall of the Bastille as their national day; the Germans commemorated a military battle, the battle of Sedan, emphasizing by their choice the causal relationship between unification and the defeat of the “arch-enemy” France. Inevitably the structure of the Reich was permeated with the autocratic spirit of victorious Prussia. The Empire did not emanate from the will of the people. Sovereignty resided in twenty-two rulers—four kings, six grand dukes, four dukes, and eight princes—who, in company with the senates of three free cities, created the Empire by a voluntary act of association. In theory these princes were all equal; in practice no one denied that the Prussian ruler was more equal than the others; as German Emperor, he was head of the imperial executive and civil service, and he was also supreme warlord of all the armed forces of the Empire.

  The Reich was, however, rather more than a simple extension of Prussian power over the southern states. Constitutionally it did not fit easily into any category known to political scientists. Essentially the Reich was an uneasy compromise between the forces of conservative federalism, the liberal unitary principle and the military might of Prussia.

  The federal basis of the Empire was enshrined in the Bundesrat or Federal Council. This was an assembly of ambassadors from the various states. Constitutionally it was the executive body of the Empire and was endowed with considerable power and prestige. Its consent was necessary for all legislation; it could veto constitutional changes; and foreign policy was, in theory, supervised by a special Bundesrat committee. States were represented in accordance with size and power. Prussia had seventeen of the fifty-eight seats, Bavaria six and the smaller states one each. Theoretically Prussia could be outvoted on constitutional and military questions, as fourteen votes constituted a veto. In practice, the smaller states never opposed Prussia on important issues. Bundesrat meetings were held in private and were always presided over by the Emperor or the chancellor.

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