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I see every sign of a proud, fatuously self-confident, provincial gentleman swept away by the wealth and style of the English aristocracy, so incomparably richer and more confident than the rural squires who made up the Prussian Junker class.
English country houses like Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, home of an untitled gentry family, the Wilsons, were bigger, grander, and more impressive than most of the palaces of reigning German princes, and the Wilsons were much, much richer than any equivalent Prussian family.
The Duke of Cleveland must have had an income at least twenty times that of one of the highest-paid Prussian civil servants in the mid-nineteenth century. A 22-year-old country squire, dazzled at the prospects before him, could not entertain the Duke’s party in a suitable
manner without going into inconceivable amounts of debt.
It was a repeat of the previous summer with Bismarck hosting champagne dinners, incurring debts, and overstaying his leave.
Once again he thought he had become engaged.
With my shortage of funds, I do not think I can take a wife who brings less than £1,000 a year, and I am not sure whether L. is willing or even able in the long run to give so much … How do you like these calculations from the pen of somebody who considers himself to be very
much in love?79 One can see now why the devout editors of the Gesammelte Werke left these ten letters out. He had behaved despicably from beginning to end.
He had been absent without leave for months on end and done no work. He had been ruled by his pride and had spent a fortune to save face.
It seems fairly certain that he decided to leave his potentially brilliant career in the civil service because the burden of his huge and still growing debts oppressed him.
how his life had become unbearable, the work disgusted him, and how the prospect of spending his whole life to end up a Regierungspräsident on 2,000 thaler a year filled his great soul with despair.
The activity of the individual civil servant among us is very rarely independent, even that of the highest, and for the rest their activity confines itself to pushing the administrative machinery along the tracks already laid down. The Prussian civil servant resembles a player in an orchestra. He may be the first violin or play the triangle; without oversight or influence on the whole he must play his part, as it is set down, whether he think it good or bad. I will make music, which I consider good or none at all.86
The population of Prussia grew between 1816 and 1864 from 23,552,000 to 37,819,000 or by 59 per cent.
the size of the estates meant that the distance between one manor house and another was considerable and he spent a good deal of the time alone, reading and often drinking too much.
‘Are you ready?’ No sound from us. Two pistol shots crashed through the window-glass and knocked plaster onto my friend, who crept to the window and stuck a white handkerchief out on the end of a stick. In a few minutes we were downstairs. Bismarck greeted us with his usual heartiness without a word about his little victory.94
‘the mad Junker’
Meeting Marie brought him together with a remarkable young woman with whom he fell instantly and hopelessly in love. Had she been free, he might never have unified Germany,
Nobody in their ranks could use the profane weapons of wit, commanding presence, brilliance, and literary elegance better than Otto von Bismarck.
Christopher Clark traces the peculiarly Lutheran variant of this general Evangelical movement.
Since the Hohenzollern dynasty had been Calvinist since 1603 but the majority of their subjects remained firmly Lutheran, the Pietists with their thrift and discipline became a group from whom the monarchs recruited efficient and pliant civil servants. These Christians brought no baggage of ancient Lutheran claims to feudal rights.
The von Witzleben family produced fourteen Generals between 1755 and 1976, one of whom, Field Marshall Job-Wilhelm Georg Erwin von Witzleben, was executed for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.105
Hitler ordered that he be hanged from a butcher’s hook and filmed in his final agonies so that the Führer could relish the death of a Junker aristocrat who had tried to kill him.
1851 they convinced the King to appoint a 37-year-old ‘mad Junker’ with no diplomatic experience, a reputation for violent and extravagant gestures, too clever by half, and of dubious character, to the second most important diplomatic post in Germany, Prussian Ambassador to the German Bundestag or Federal Council in Frankurt.
The Gerlachs ‘made’ Bismarck and Leopold in particular saw Bismarck as ‘his’ creature.
full of his charm and literary self-awareness:
The death of Marie triggered a series of decisions in Bismarck’s life. On 18 November, scarcely a week later, Bismarck signed a contract giving Herr Klug the tenancy of Kniephof. Klug had formerly been tenant of Pansin. Next he decided to marry Marie’s friend, Johanna von Puttkamer. On 16 December 1846, Bismarck wrote the famous Werbebrief (suitor letter) to Heinrich von Puttkamer asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Oceans of ink have been poured by previous biographers in their attempts to make sense of this letter.
The new Bismarck had emerged—the politician. From that moment to her death in 1894 Johanna would have to suffer his long absences, his tensions, and preoccupations as Bismarck for the first time found his true calling.
There was, as she wrote, the possibility of ‘real spiritual partnership between married people or between parents and children’ but Bismarck never experienced that.
I calculated that from November to the present I had received 41 invitations to dinner and 53 to an evening.’141 The arithmetic shows that there were 94 formal invitations for the 197 days or one every other day for six and a half months, and that excludes less formal occasions without written invitations. A lady in the highest society lived that way.
The Bismarcks after a certain point simply stopped going out.
When Johanna finally died on 27 November 1894, Hildegard Spitzemberg discovered that she was no longer welcome ‘at Bismarcks’ as she had been for thirty years. It suddenly became clear that Johanna had wanted her there to play the role that she had filled: to give Bismarck that safe dose of feminine beauty and intelligence that Bismarck needed and Johanna could never supply.
offer—an astonishingly powerful personality and a magnetism which must have attracted them.
He had no experience, no credentials, and no obvious qualifications, but he was Bismarck. That turned out to be enough.
As always when Bismarck saw his personal, patrimonial interests threatened, he went into action.
Bismarck’s new political activity gave him tremendous pleasure. As he wrote to Johanna, he was ‘full of politics to the point of bubbling over’.5
He had found his purpose in life. Bismarck had become—and in that respect he always remained—a brilliant, persuasive and overwhelmingly convincing parliamentary politician.
He took care to make this enterprise as medieval, feudal, romantic, and unlike the French National Assembly as possible, nothing to do with one man-one vote.
Their legitimacy derived from a legislative act by the state, not from the authority of an extra-governmental corporate tradition.
the ‘noble Estate’ (Ritterschaft) was no longer defined by birth (with the exception of the small contingent of ‘immediate’ nobles in the Rhineland) but by property. It was the ownership of ‘privileged land’ that counted, not birth into privilege status.9
Between 1815 and 1847 the world had changed dramatically. For reasons which demographers still debate, European population began to grow in the middle of the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth as Table 1 shows:11
As in the Irish famine of 1845, the impossibility of moving goods before railroads meant that people starved to death when ample supplies lay just beyond their reach.
Even though these peasants were free, their smallholdings led to grinding poverty.
Prussia in 1850 belonged among the backward continental European states.
Railroads had just started to transform European life. During the 1830s and 1840s railroad companies sprang up and the first primitive, short lines were built.
Within twenty years, European travel and trade had been revolutionized by the railroad boom
In the 1840s there was a short-lived German railroad ‘bubble’ as speculative investment piled into the new joint stock companies and raised share prices on insecure foundations. In 1843 a series of bankruptcies set off the first modern depression, though still very small in scale, at the same time that the last European famine crisis had hit East Prussia.
‘the public mood in Berlin seemed to reflect the weather
On 17 May 1847 Bismarck made his maiden speech, as the first speech by a new member in the House of Commons is called.
It is hard to grasp how offensive Bismarck’s remarks were. A whole generation of Prussian liberals had lived through the cold days of reaction by warming their hopes on the glorious memories of the people’s war for liberty, which Bismarck belittled.
Stenographic report: murmuring and loud shouting interrupts the speaker; he draws the Spenersche Newspaper from his pocket and reads it until the Marshall has restored order. He then continues
