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Preservation of his great achievement meant constant watchfulness for threats from abroad as well as enemies at home.
Bismarck’s final wishes had been set out: no postmortem, no death mask, no drawings, no photographs, and a burial place on the grounds. There were to be no flamboyant gestures from Kaiser William II and no ceremony in Berlin.
Bismarck’s personality had such contradictions in it that it could be experienced as positive or negative—angelic or demonic—sometimes both at the same time.
With his usual chattiness there appears something soft and always lightly smiling across his broad lips, but directly behind lies something powerfully tearing, definitely like a predatory beast.
‘I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.’
He began to see Bismarck as a kind of malign genius who, behind the various postures, concealed an ice-cold contempt for his fellow human beings and a methodical determination to control and rule them.
His easy chat combined blunt truths, partial revelations, and outright deceptions. His extraordinary double ability to see how groups would react and the willingness to use violence to make them obey, the capacity to read group behaviour and the force to make them move to his will, gave him the chance to exercise what I have called his ‘sovereign self’.
what lay behind the charm and fluency—an absen...
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‘has a very bad character; he has not hesitated to disclaim his friends and those who have helped him most.’
He was the over-mighty courtier, or a Richelieu, or a major domus. However, none adequately caught the breadth and depth of his huge personality.
Like the traditional palace favourite, he rose by camarilla and fell by it. He was a dictator but one dependent on the will of the King.
He bubbled with rage. Nobody ever indulged himself so utterly in vehement or violent anger as Otto von Bismarck. He raged and hated until he nearly killed himself. He lost his temper at the slightest provocation.
The rest of his life he stewed and fumed and suffered the aftermath of these fits in sleeplessness and psychosomatic illnesses.
The cure was simple and Christian: ‘love thine enemies!’
I cannot recall a letter in which Bismarck apologized for anything more serious than not writing or forgetting a family birthday. He certainly made no apology to his enemies and, when five cabinet ministers asked permission to go to Lasker’s funeral, he said ‘certainly not’—and this tells us a great deal—none of them went.
His wrath destroyed his eldest son, Herbert, who could not marry the woman he loved because Bismarck hated her family. They belonged to the clique of his ‘enemies’. The objects of his rage and hatred mattered more to him than his child.
One need not be a Freudian to see how the hatred that Bismarck felt for his cold, intelligent, and unloving mother became an obsession as he exercised his genius and will in politics.
The stubborn refusal of Johanna von Bismarck to make herself into a society lady for him meant that nowhere could he find consolation or a way to escape the Oedipal triangle which Prussian kingship forced him to re-enact every day.
Augusta certainly hated Bismarck and with reason, but she was sane. She knew that she had to live with the demonic Chancellor and his hypnotic power over her husband.
When in March 1873 Odo and Lady Emily Russell enjoyed the ‘unique favour’ of a visit from the Emperor and Empress to the British embassy for a private dinner, protocol required Bismarck to sit on the left of Her Imperial Majesty for an hour or so and to make polite conversation. He could not do it and refused the invitation. The greatest political genius of the nineteenth century lacked the courage and self-control to behave like the ‘nobleman’ he claimed to be in the presence of his sovereign and his sovereign lady. All he had to do was chat for an hour. The Iron Chancellor, who caused three
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He had lied to his mother from early childhood and continued to lie all his life.
He always lied when he might be blamed for something. As Waldersee observed, ‘lying has become a habit with him.’
His preoccupation with military uniforms could be called another kind of lie. He had been a draft dodger in 1839–40 and lied about that,
If pride kills the soul, rage and gluttony ravage the body. Eating as a substitute for whatever Bismarck lacked represents yet again his utter unwillingness to exercise self-control over his appetites
He had many virtues. He was courteous to visitors, irrespective of status. He had both charm and warmth
The modest way the Bismarcks lived struck everybody as remarkable, and his irresistible sense of humour could win over enemies. Bismarck enjoyed the love and affection of his family and friends.
He could not, on the other hand, forgive and forget. Bismarck’s hostility to Queen Augusta concerned her politics. She was a Saxon princess, liberal in a sort of Coburgian way, friendly with Catholics, sympathetic to the middle states, and very intelligent.
Bismarck saw politics as struggle. When he talked about ‘politics as the art of the possible’, he meant that in a limited sense. He never considered compromise a satisfactory outcome. He had to win and destroy the opponents or lose and be destroyed himself.
In international relations, it meant absolutely no emotional commitment to any of the actors. Diplomacy should, he believed, deal with realities, calculations of probabilities, assessing the inevitable missteps and sudden lurches by the other actors, states, and their statesmen.
In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless. He could outsmart and outplay the smartest people in other states
He chose to complicate his life by stirring up the Kulturkampf and in due course provoking conservatives, liberals, progressives as well as the Guelphs, Poles, and Alsatians who sat in the Reichstag.
What is the purpose of the art of politics if not to serve some cause, to improve the conditions under which people have to live,
Bismarck bequeathed to his successors an unstable structure of rule. The constitution of Prussia had been thrown together in the muddle of the revolution of 1848–9. Bismarck preserved it with its grossly unbalanced representation system. It continued to give the small class of Junker landlords a permanent veto on progress. Since Prussia amounted to three-quarters of the population, territory, and industrial power, it served as a surrogate for Germany as whole.
He used the people to undermine and tame the German princes, whose power and intransigence he grossly overestimated. On the other hand he underestimated the power of the people because he failed to see how the people had changed by the middle of the nineteenth century. He saw that the people had put Napoleon III into power and assumed that the masses were monarchical.
By the 1880s he could no longer prevent the growing forces of Social Democracy, the Catholic Centre, and bourgeois liberalism from representing their constituents.
In 1863 when Bismarck used universal suffrage as a means to a political end, neither he nor anybody else could imagine that in three decades Germany would dominate central Europe with its heavy industries, its excellent technological institutes, its skilled, literate, and increasingly urban workforces, its mines and mills, its railroads, steamships, telephones and telegraphs, its thriving ports and harbours, a vigorous shipbuilding industry, its great trading companies and giant factories, its advanced medical facilities, its physics and chemistry and excellent engineering. It had the best
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Mass society meant capitalism and capitalism brought its liberal ideology and the demand for free trade, free movement of people and goods, free access to crafts and professions, banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies, and traders.
Anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century became a surrogate for everything that the Junkers, churches, peasants, and artisans most feared and distrusted.
party which believed in free speech, free press, parliamentary immunity, separation of church and state, free markets, abolition of the death penalty, constitutional monarchy, representative cabinets, that is, the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, must be crushed as an ‘enemy of the Reich’ and as ‘Jewish’.
Bismarck certainly did not create the anti-Semitism, which was universal at all levels of German society, but he used it to crush his enemies irrespective of the consequences. Anti-Semitism and its anti-liberal poison passed into the bloodstream of Germany to become virulent in the overheated atmosphere of the First World War and to become lethal in its aftermath.
it is richly ironic that Kaiser William dismissed Bismarck in March 1890 because he had been consorting ‘with Jesuits and Jews’.
He became the Iron Chancellor, the all-powerful, all-wise, genius-statesman, the man who unified Germany. His image hung in every schoolroom and over many a hearth. He embodied and manifested the greatness of Germany. The image became itself a burden to his successors. He made it impossible, as Caprivi wished, that Germany should get along with ‘normal people’. Germany had to have a genius-statesman as its ruler.
The real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac, and misogynist, only appeared in biographies late in the twentieth century.
There are deep ironies in the career of Otto von Bismarck: the civilian always in uniform, the hysterical hypochondriac as the symbol of iron consistency, the successes which become failures, the achievement of supreme power in a state too modern and too complex for him to run, the achievement of greater success than anybody in modern history which turned out to be a Faustian bargain.
He smashed the possibility of responsible parliaments in 1878 when he used the two attempts to assassinate the Kaiser to destroy moderate bourgeois liberalism.
His legacy in culture was literally nothing. He had no interest in the arts, never went to a museum, only read lyric poetry from his youth or escapist literature.
The means were Olympian, the ends tawdry and pathetic. All that fuss to give Kaiser William II the ability to dislocate rational government and cause international unrest. Sir Edward Grey compared Germany to a huge battleship without a rudder. Bismarck arranged it that way; only he could steer it.
He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state. He preferred to shoot workers rather than to listen to their complaints. He made his Junker friends into enemies and then ridiculed them. He mocked their Christian beliefs and offended their faith and values.
He left a nation totally without political education … totally bereft of political will [italics in the original—JS] accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them. And further as a result of his improper exploitation of monarchical sentiment to conceal his own power politics in party battles, it had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of ‘monarchical government’.
He moved no crowds at mass meetings and in parliament he roused his listeners more by insults and scorn than by overwhelming oratory, but he had that ‘demonic’ power that made him an irresistible political figure and a disastrous one.
