No statesman has ever enjoyed such an inflated reputation as Otto von Bismarck. His catchphrases still reverberate around the echo-chamber of politics: “Realpolitik,” “honest broker,” “the art of the possible.” He fought three wars and won all of them. He unified Germany and made it a Continental superpower. But he also unleashed the daemonic forces that came close to destroying Western civilization in the twentieth century. If Hitler was the most devilish figure in modern history, Bismarck was the most Faustian. It was this Prussian reactionary whose “blood and iron” smashed the old rules that had hitherto constrained the destructive power of modernity. He probably never said “laws are like sausages: it’s better not to see them being made.” Yet the remark was attributed to him, for he held not only laws but humanity in contempt.
Jonathan Steinberg’s magnificent biography brings out the monstrous egotism of Bismarck more clearly than anybody before him. Steinberg suggests that the key to the young Otto was his cold, clever, and frustrated mother, from whom he inherited his brains and his ruthless streak, but who also left him damaged and emotionally crippled. At university in Göttingen, the teenage Bismarck fought twenty-five duels and befriended an American student, John Motley, later the celebrated historian of the Dutch Republic. Motley was so impressed by this “mad Junker,” who “in every respect . . . went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known,” that he wrote a biographical novel about him. Morton’s Hope revolves around the character of Otto von Rabenmarck, who defeats all rivals with the duelling saber. Despite his wild conduct, he declares: “I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life. You see I am a very rational sort of person. . . . To obtain mastery over my competitors, who were all extravagant, savage, eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant and savage as anyone else.”
It was this Prussian reactionary whose “blood and iron” smashed the old rules that had hitherto constrained the destructive power of modernity.
Bismarck did indeed grow up to be a savage: a man of voracious appetites and volcanic temper, a liar and a bully who thought nothing of betraying friends and destroying enemies. According to Steinberg, Bismarck committed all seven deadly sins habitually. He threatened resignation regularly in order to blackmail his royal masters, but when the young Kaiser Wilhelm II finally called his bluff and dispensed with his services, Bismarck’s determination to exact vengeance endured beyond the grave. Even his lifelong friend and admirer Baroness Spitzemberg wrote a grim tribute: “Blood is blood and the Bismarcks are defiant, violent men, unrestrained by education and not noble in temperament.”
Yet he could also be charm itself. Among those charmed was Disraeli, who came to know him well during the Berlin Congress in 1878. This was perhaps the zenith of Bismarck’s career, when he had all the great powers dancing attendance on him. Their respect was mutual: “The old Jew—he is the man,” was another of Bismarck’s bon mots that went the rounds of the conference chamber. Disraeli, however, saw through the charm and discerned the abyss into which Bismarck’s “German revolution” had precipitated Europe: “Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists,” he told the House of Commons in 1871, days after Bismarck had proclaimed the new German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles:
There is not a diplomatic tradition that has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown dangers and objects with which to cope. . . . The balance of power has been utterly destroyed, and the country that suffers most, and feels the effect of this great change most, is England.
It is entirely typical of Bismarck that he should have upset the delicate balance of European diplomacy for the sake of a goal—German unity—in which he had no emotional investment whatsoever. He did not care a fig for Germany; as for Europe, it was a mere “geographical ｅxpression.” As for the Balkans, the casus belli which gave him the excuse to hold the Berlin Congress, they were “not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.” The only cause that Bismarck cared about was the Prussian monarchy, on which his own power entirely depended. on his grave, the epitaph reads: “A faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.”
Yet how faithful a servant of the crown was he? He manipulated the “old gentleman,” Wilhelm I, whom he claimed to revere; intrigued against the son, Friedrich III, as he lay on his deathbed; and alienated the grandson, Wilhelm II, who responded by “dropping the pilot.” He tried to turn Wilhelm I against his liberal wife, Augusta, and spied on her successor as Empress, Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky, spreading vicious rumors about her and her British doctor Sir Morrell Mackenzie, who treated Friedrich’s terminal throat cancer. With ministers like this, a monarch does not need enemies.
Steinberg paints a vivid and persuasive portrait of this “genius-statesman,” but it comes with a health warning. He argues that Bismarck’s realpolitik, in which dubious ends justified even more dubious means, accustomed the Germans to an autocratic and arbitrary style of government that infantilized them and left them vulnerable to the even more megalomaniacal Hitler. Most damning of all is the terrible political legacy that he bequeathed to the new German Reich. Having emancipated the Jews, Bismarck then turned against them; it suited him to let anti-Semitism emerge as a tool that could be used to bury liberalism as a political force. It was Bismarck, too, who fought the first “culture war,” the Kulturkampf, against Catholics. The only result of this was to strengthen Catholic resistance. Steinberg’s two heroes are Eduard Lasker and Ludwig Windhorst, the leaders of German Liberals and Catholics respectively. When Lasker died, Bismarck revealed his contempt for the democracy he had created: the Reichstag was “the guest house of the dead Jew.” As a parliamentarian, however, Windhorst was more than a match for Bismarck; the Centre Party he created not only survived but became the forerunner of post-war Christian democracy. Nor could Bismarck’s use of police state tactics halt the rise of socialism. By the time he lost power, Bismarck was plotting a putsch to reverse the very limited degree of parliamentary democracy that the 1871 constitution conceded.
The only cause that Bismarck cared about was the Prussian monarchy, on which his own power entirely depended.
The myth of Bismarck—the soldier and seer who saved the Germans from the machinations of Jews and Jesuits—was partly his own creation. This myth was wholly pernicious but, like the Faust myth, it had great power over the imagination. In retirement, Bismarck—a gifted journalist who might, Steinberg thinks, have made a great comic novelist—used a Hamburg newspaper to propagate his own version of history, a version which was taken up after his death by the anti-Semites and the ultra-nationalists. Steinberg has brilliantly transformed this man of “blood and irony” into a tragic figure worthy to be compared with Goethe’s Faust. If Bismarck himself was a Faustian figure, who had renounced all ethical and political principles for the sake of power, then the soul he sold was not merely his own, but that of Germany.