Too few Germans subsequently remembered that it was Bismarck who was responsible for defining politics as ‘the art of the possible.’3 He always insisted that his technique was to calculate the way events were going, then take advantage of them for his own purposes. He himself put it more poetically: ‘A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment’.
