Bismarck: A Life

"A. J. P. Taylor wrote a short book on Bismarck. There are others. There are a handful of great biographies, but they’re all very, very long. I suppose the field is held by the late Otto Pflanze, an American historian, born in Tennessee and descended from German immigrants. He wrote a huge three-volume biography of Bismarck, which is incredibly thorough. Then there’s a thematic study in two volumes by Lothar Gall, which is also available in English. There’s an extremely interesting biography, untranslated, by another great German historian, Ernst Engelberg. He was a communist and leading academic in communist East Germany. The first volume of his biography came out under the East German regime and the second after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s fascinating to read the two parts. Unfortunately, it never got translated into English. It’s a wonderful book. Steinberg is a single volume and it’s only 500 pages, which is rather less than half the length of Sheehan and Clark. There’s something about German history that makes historians write very long books. I can plead guilty myself, having written a three-volume history of Nazi Germany! Steinberg is American, but he spent most of his career in Cambridge, England. This is quite a recent book, so he was able to make use of these earlier great biographies. It was published in 2011, and he’s another very fluent writer, which is one of my criteria—Otto Pflanze’s biography is authoritative and exhaustive but you couldn’t call it an easy read. The same goes for Gall and Engelberg. A. J. P. Taylor’s is an easy read but it’s not thorough and it’s not exhaustive. It’s rather short and typical of Taylor, full of bons mots and so on. It’s also a prisoner of Taylor’s very negative view of German history, that the Third Reich is the inevitable culmination of the whole of German history up to that point. Steinberg is readable, but very thorough. The unusual thing about him is that he makes very considerable use of other people’s views of Bismarck, using diaries and letters, not just of other Germans, but British and American contemporaries. You get to see Bismarck from inside and outside and that’s quite a new angle. “He said the art of statesmanship was ‘to listen to the rustle of God’s cloak as he crosses the stage of history and seize hold of the hem’” Bismarck, of course, was a rabid conservative in the 1840s, during 1848, and in the 1850s. He was a Prussian aristocrat, but also descended from a bureaucratic family. Another important feature of Prussia is its bureaucracy. It had a huge civil service, which was very hardworking and very prestigious alongside the military. Bismarck really came to prominence in the 1860s because in 1862 the liberals, who had failed to unify Germany in 1848, were resurgent, particularly because of the unification of Italy in 1859. The German liberals and nationalists, thought, ‘Well, goodness, if the Italians can do it, surely we can do it.’ And so they blocked the budget in the Prussian parliament. One of the rarely-mentioned successes of the 1848 revolution was that it forced the Prussian monarchy to set up a parliament with quite substantial powers. The Liberals got a majority, even with a very limited franchise, and in 1862 they blocked the budget. The king, Wilhelm I, in desperation, summoned the toughest, most ruthless, most conservative politician he could think of, Bismarck, and made him head of the government. And that’s where unification started. He gave a famous speech that absolutely terrified the Liberals, arguing to the effect that the way to unify Germany was not through speeches and resolutions and parliamentary debates, but through iron and blood. Terrifying—although he apparently had rather a squeaky voice, so it may not have been the thunderous thing that it looks like on paper. Although he believed in preserving as much as he could of the Prussian institutions and the independence of the monarchy, the independence of the army, and limiting the powers of the parliamentary assemblies, he was a realist who knew that the force of nationalism, of national unity, was unstoppable, that this was the way history was going. He expressed this rather poetically, saying that the art of statesmanship is “to steer the ship of state on a course on the stream of time”. In other words, not to fight against the stream of time, but to go with it and steer it the way you want. Another way he put it was that the art of statesmanship was “to listen to the rustle of God’s cloak as he crosses the stage of history and seize hold of the hem”. So, he was a realist and he knew that the idea of ‘a big Germany’ including Austria was not workable because the Habsburg monarchy included not only parts of the old German Reich—the German Confederation—like Austria and Bohemia, but also large chunks of territory outside, like Hungary, which the Habsburgs could never give up. So, the Habsburgs had to be kicked out of Germany. There were three wars, 1864 against Denmark because the Danes were nationalists as well and there was a territorial dispute with them; and then against the Austrians, which was the big, important one, to push them out of Germany; then, of course, against Napoleon III, the Emperor of France in 1870. Napoleon III resisted German unification and was tricked by Bismarck into declaring war. It was a war that everybody expected the French to win, but they lost thanks to General von Moltke, the great Prussian general, who used railways to great effect to move masses of troops about very quickly. In 1871 the Reich was founded. Bismarck was very ruthless and, to rub salt into the wound, he actually held the foundation ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—just to tell the French they’d had it. He set up a constitution which he thought achieved what he wanted, which was to preserve the autonomy of the king and his powers as German Emperor. The German Emperor was always to be the King of Prussia, keeping the Prussian civil service as the most important administrative centre of the Reich, limiting the powers of parliament quite severely. “Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany in the 1970s, said he admired Bismarck not for what he did before 1871, but for keeping the peace in Europe after 1871” Bismarck took a leaf out of Napoleon III’s book—Napoleon III was the inventor of modern dictatorship—and gave the vote to all adult males, universal manhood suffrage. Napoleon III thought the mass of peasants in France were conservative. Bismarck thought the same of the German peasantry, so he introduced universal manhood suffrage, too. But that was an enormous miscalculation because he didn’t reckon on the speed and force of industrialization, which created a huge and growing working class that voted for the Socialists. By the time of Wilhelm II in the 1900s, the Socialists were the biggest party in the Reichstag and that was creating increasing problems. Wilhelm I, the first German emperor, once said, “It’s really difficult being Kaiser under Bismarck.” Wilhelm II had no intention of playing that kind of role. He wanted to run the show, so he kicked Bismarck out. Bismarck was a realist, not only in the way that he ruthlessly unified Germany without Austria, but also in realizing that the task from 1871 was to bed down, keep things quiet, and stop other powers uniting and attacking Germany; generally behaving decently so that other countries would accept the German Empire. Wilhelm II had no idea about the precariousness of Germany’s situation in the world of established great powers. He just wanted to throw his weight around. Absolutely, yes. Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany in the 1970s, said he admired Bismarck not for what he did before 1871, but for keeping the peace in Europe after 1871. No, he hung around and that was rather unfortunate. He died in 1898. He was around for long enough after he was kicked out to become a figurehead for the hard right. The younger generation of German nationalists and conservatives remembered him for what he had done in the 1860s as the ‘Iron Chancellor’, the wielder of military power, crushing opposition. That was a mistake, but he encouraged it and he became a central focus of the ultra-right. No, not at all. Ironically, he ended up steering the ship of state against the stream of time. He didn’t really understand industrialization. He lived in Friedrichsruh, just outside Hamburg, which became the biggest seaport in Germany and a major industrial centre with a huge working class. When he went to open some new harbour facilities there in 1888, he looked around and saw the steam cranes and the machinery and the shipbuilding yards and turned to the merchant princes and said, “Gentlemen, this is a world I no longer understand.” He’d expected the mass of ordinary Germans to vote conservative, but with the industrialization of the country, they voted socialist and that was something he didn’t understand either. He tried to ban the Socialists. From 1878 to 1890 the Social Democratic Party was outlawed, although you couldn’t stop individuals from standing for parliament, which they certainly did. It was a very unsuccessful policy and alienated the working class."