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Bismarck commanded those around him by the sheer power of his personality.
‘sovereign self’.
the power he exercised came from him as a person, not from institutions, mass society or ‘forces and factors’. The power rested on the sovereignty of an extraordinary, gigantic self.
that combination of physical presence, speech patterns and facial expressions, style in thought and action, virtues and vices, will and ambition, and, perhaps, in addition, a certain set of characteristic fears, evasions, and psychological patterns of behaviour that make us recognizable as ‘persons’, the selves we project and conceal, in short, what makes people know us. Bismarck somehow had more of every aspect of self than anybody around him, and all who knew him—without exception—testify to a kind of magnetic pull or attraction which even those who hated him could not deny. His writing has
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came to embody everything brutal and ruthless about Prussian culture.
a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed tears, a convert to an extreme form of evangelical Protestantism, who secularized schools and introduced civil divorce.
His fellow Junker aristocrats came to distrust him; he was too clever, too unstable, too unpredictable, not ‘a proper chap’. But all agreed that he was brilliant.
it was Roon who sent the famous telegram of 18 September 1862: ‘periculum in mora. Depêchez-vous!’ (Danger in delay. Make haste!), which gave Bismarck the sign that his hour of destiny had come.
To construct the parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all.18
had a reputation for utter unreliability, superficial cleverness and extremely reactionary views,
Bismarck gained and held power by the strength and brilliance of his personality but he always depended on the good will of his King.
During those twenty-six years Bismarck forced the King again and again by temper tantrums, hysteria, tears, and threats to do things that every fibre in his spare Royal Prussian frame rejected.
a statesman does not create the stream of time, he floats on it and tries to steer.
that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.21
Bismarck shows us the strengths and weaknesses of the human self when it exercises power. It shows how powerful the large self can be but it also shows how the exercise of supreme political power never leaves its holders unchanged.
to explain to author and reader how Bismarck exercised his personal power. The method is to let those on whom the power was exercised, friend and foe, German and foreign, young and old, anybody who experienced the power of Bismarck’s personality close up and recorded the impact, tell the story.
We went in and found under the bed the two objects we sought which were of colossal dimensions. As we stationed ourselves at the wall, Sybel spoke seriously and from the depth of his heart, ‘Everything about the man is great, even his s—!!24
Bismarck wrote uninterruptedly for sixty years. The official collected works run to nineteen volumes, quarto sized, with an average of more than 500 pages each.25 Volume VIc alone runs to 438 pages just to include the reports sent to the Kaiser, dictation notes, and other official writings from 1871 to 1890. Bismarck wrote thousands of letters to family, friends, and others. He controlled both domestic and foreign policy for twenty-eight years so his correspondence and official writing covered everything from the threat of war with Russia to the state monopoly on tobacco.
He seems to have made it his business to know everything about everything. The result was a constant, furious absorption of material and equally stupendous bouts of writing or dictation.
He forced me to drink with him so that I did not see how much he consumed.27
When he himself does not want to do something, he barricades himself behind the Kaiser’s will, when everybody knows that he gets his way on anything if he really wants it.28
Imagine trying to govern under such a man who tolerates no dissent, who sees disagreement as disloyalty and who never forgets an injury.
the Bismarck regime was a constant orgy of scorn and abuse of mankind, collectively and individually. This tendency is also the source of Prince Bismarck’s greatest blunders.
in foreign affairs, he never—I think—behaved as he often did in domestic affairs—angrily and irrationally.
he became the prisoner of forces he could not control but took entirely rational action to deal with them as carefully as he could right to the end.
one of the most interesting, gifted, and contradictory human beings who ever lived.
an Urpreusse, a basic or essential Prussian,
what did it mean to be ‘Prussian’
On 20 March 1815, twelve days before the baby Bismarck took his first breath, Napoleon had escaped from exile on the island of Elba and returned to Paris.
Christopher Clark in his splendid history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom,
That this unpromising small principality became the core of the most powerful European kingdom had everything to do with the rulers who governed it between 1640 and 1918.
In an age when precarious succession and sudden death might destabilize the early modern state, the Hohenzollerns lived on and on.
two of the ablest rulers in the centuries before the French Revolution: the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, the latter, perhaps, the ablest man ever to govern a modern state.
it was Frederick II the Great (1740–86) who transformed his father’s realm both in military and civil affairs. Frederick was the genius king—a victorious general, an enlightened despot, a philosopher, and a musician. His legacy loomed over subsequent Prussian history and it is his Prussia which Bismarck inherited.
His indifference to religion was an essential tenet of the Enlightenment.
Frederick the Great left a legacy which not even Bismarck could alter. He set an example of the dutiful ruler, the hard-working and all-competent sovereign.
He is industrious, places obligation before recreation, sees first to business … There is no other monarch like him, none so abstemious, so consistent, none who is so adept at dividing his time.5
A genius as king must be an unlikely outcome of the genetic lottery.
In practice Frederick the Great left a
set of legacies which Bismarck inherited and helped to preserve: first that the king must work as first servant of the state. William I took that injunction seriously. William I may not have been Frederick the Great but he had inherited the conviction t...
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This sense of service to the Crown among the Prussian aristocracy defined them and their idea of who they were.
‘Yes, but what’s the use? I have to lunch with an old uncle of mine … Besides he, that is my uncle, served in your regiment, admittedly a long time ago, early 40s. Baron Osten.’ ‘The one from Wietzendorf?’ ‘The very same.’ ‘O, I know him, that is, the name. A bit related. My grandmother
was an Osten. Is he the one who has declared war on Bismarck?’ ‘That’s the one. You know what, Wedell? You should come too. The Club won’t run away and Pitt and Serge will be there too. You will find them whether you show up at 1 or at 3. The old boy still loves the Dragoon blue and gold and is a good enough old Prussian to be delighted with every Wedell.’
they all know each other and often turn out to be related. They identify with their regiments the way an Englishman does with his public school or Oxford and Cambridge college.
The old man embodies the virtues of the old
Prussian nobility: devotion to duty, efficiency, punctuality, self-sacrifice, often based on an authentic Lutheran or Evangelical Protestant piety, and a fierce, implacable pride.
South and West German ‘vons’ existed too but few of them had ‘served’ Frederick the Great. They belonged to the richer, more relaxed, less dour, often Catholic, aristocracy.
Freiherren only recognized the Holy Roman Emperor as sovereign. They obeyed no territorial princes in whose territories their estates happen to be located.
looked at the Junker class with a mixture of admiration and revulsion.
it was they—a von Moltke, a von Yorck, a von Witzleben, and others of their class—who formed the core of the 1944 plot on Hitler’s life.
