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the Russian occupation of
Brandenburg, Pomerania, Ducal Prussia, and the other ‘core’ territories to destroy their es...
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On 25 February 1947 the Allied occupation authorities signed a law which abolished the state of Prussia itself, the only state in world history to be abolished by decree: The Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer...
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He boasted of his long Junker lineage, but he never entirely conformed to the type, never quite behaved as a proper Junker.
For old Baron Osten, the army had unified Germany not Bismarck.
Prussian Junkers took every occasion to wear uniform and Bismarck insisted on one, even though he had only served briefly and most unwillingly as a reservist.
The prestige of the army rested on Frederick the Great’s victories. It took a total defeat of Frederick the Great’s army in 1806 to allow a team of ‘defence intellectuals’ loose on the Junkers’ prized possession, the Prussian army.
The opponents of France turned Burke’s Reflections into arguments for rule from above by the aristocracy and, of course, against reforming enlightened despots.
For Burke Jews represented everything tawdry and commercial about markets:
Burke’s best pupils and most avid readers were reactionary Prussian landlords and enemies of ‘progress’ in every country. After all, the old ruling classes in Europe 1790 were landowners and feudal lords. Their hatred of free markets, free citizens, free peasants, free movement of capital and labour, free thought, Jews, stock markets, banks, cities, and a free press continued to 1933 and helped to bring about the Nazi dictatorship.
Burke, the classical liberal, was now the prophet of reaction, the perfect example of his own law of unintended consequences.
In the winter of 1792–3, a 30-year-old clerk in the Prussian administration under Frederick William II described a potential legacy of the French Revolution that not even Burke could have imagined.
Burke and Gentz together had created modern conservatism.
the first Burkean defence of the Junker class and the articulation of the structural anti-Semitism which forms a continuous thread in Prussian and then German hatred of Jews.
this attack on Jews as the bearers of capitalism, free markets, and access to landed property.
This is the Junker reply to Adam Smith. Money and mobile property are Jewish.
none of his fellow great landlords lifted a finger to help him. They may have shared his views but not to the point of prison.
Von der Marwitz cannot be equated with the entire Junker class though he saw himself as their spokesman, wrongly, as he found out. The Kingdom of Prussia had changed in ways that made his passionate defence of feudal rights obsolete.
Market forces had changed minds as well as practices in the east Elbian great estates and new Prussian legislation plus the spread of new agricultural techniques promised many of them better economic conditions.
Much of East Prussia remained ‘liberal’ the way the slave owners in the American South before 1860 preached liberalism. Exporters needed free access to foreign markets and hence supported free trade, representative institutions, especially if they controlled them, and freedom from the meddlesome state. They may hav...
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Saxony, nearer to hand and in 1815 much richer.
Nobody knew at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that beneath the farms and fields lay one of the great European coal seams.
The region had some of the highest literacy rates in eighteenth-century Europe and by 1836 only 10.8 per cent of recruits drawn from the new Rhenish territories could not sign their names.35
They had also been occupied by the French for much longer than the eastern Prussia territories and had received and accepted the Napoleonic Code with its set of individual and property rights.
‘Rhenish Law’.
The area with its good communications and enterprising capitalists became the nursery of German railroads. By 1845 half of all railways in Ger...
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The western territories of the Kingdom had a more liberal
political culture, Catholic sensibilities, commercial and increasingly industrial bourgeois elites, and in due course a different class of representatives in Prussian parliaments.
his father liked to organize elaborate hunting excursions in deepest winter in minus 8 degrees Celsius temperature when nothing stirs and when nobody shoots a thing.
Otto von Bismarck urged his sister to write about the small things of life which give their father real pleasure: whom you visit, what you have eaten, what the horses are doing, how the servants behave, whether the doors squeak and if the windows let in draughts, in short, real things, facta.3
Like many Junkers he treated his estate as a little kingdom.
How often did I repay his truly boundless, unselfish, good-natured tenderness for me with coldness and bad grace?
Mencken was so literate, charming, and quick that, though he was without family connections at court or money, he became a diplomat and rose by sheer ability to the rank of cabinet secretary in 1782 under Frederick the Great at the age of 30.
He was determined to ‘crash’ the narrow circle of the aristocracy by the force of his brilliance and personal charm, and he was unburdened by middle-class scruples in such matters as money or sex. His ability made him the greatest German political pamphleteer of his age; his connections allowed him to become ‘the secretary of Europe’ at the time of the Congress of Vienna.12
used the oedipal mechanism very effectively to explain Bismarck’s growing hypochondria, gluttony, rage, and despair.
That Bismarck’s health, temper, and emotional life deteriorated the more successful he became has been one of the most striking findings of my research on his career.
rapidly became the centre of the ‘English Enlightenment’ on the continent.
The great William Whewell, mathematician, philosopher, and long-time Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, learned about Naturwissenschaft (natural sciences) and the new type of serious university in Germany and tried to push Cambridge to imitate
Motley first met Bismarck as a 17-year-old freshman along with fellow students from Göttingen, who had begun ‘eine Bierreise’, a beer-drinking trip, the object of which was to get ‘smashed’ in as many German cities as possible.
of a Bohemian family, who had been baronized before Charlemagne’s time,
Bismarck’s urge to rule and dominate others by the force of his personality stood out even at the age of 18.
as if conflict had a cleansing or clarifying property by drawing the lines between friends and foes more sharply or defining the possible courses of action.
what will happen to him if he opts not to go into the bureaucracy but to go home to run one of his father’s estates. If Scharlach visits him in ten years he will find a well-fed Landwehr [militia—JS] officer with a moustache, who curses and swears a justifiable hatred of Frenchmen and Jews until the earth trembles, and beats his dogs and his servants in the most brutal fashion, even if he is tyrannized by his wife. I will wear leather trousers and allow myself to be ridiculed at the Wool Market in Stettin, and when anyone calls me Herr Baron, I’ll stroke my moustache in good humour and sell
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the two generals—Moltke and Roon—who marched in triumph on either side of Bismarck in the parade down Unter den Linden of June 1871 to mark the victory over France and the unification of Germany, had both spent important years in the topographical
Bismarck never showed much interest in the cultural awakening that made Germany between 1770 and 1830 the intellectual capital of the world.
The self-dramatization, the pleasure in the word painting, the exaltation of his aristocratic inheritance, and the exuberance of the writing create a powerful impact.
He became the Bismarck we know because he had a powerful personality and because he could write with such artistry.
The spa, the history and the location made it an ideal tourist attraction and certainly attracted the young Bismarck, a handsome 22-year-old, six foot four, slender, a fine linguist who spoke really good English and was utterly, utterly charming.
The year and a bit in Aachen proved emotionally turbulent and very expensive. Bismarck neglected his work, was frequently absent, and twice (at least) in love.
the Duke and Duchess had departed with Laura, with whom I am ‘as good as promised’ but he let her go without making it official. He started to gamble to recoup the debts incurred by living all summer in high society and had considered suicide, ‘I put aside for this purpose a cord of yellow silk which I have reserved for its rarity just in case.’70
