“The great questions of the day will not be settled by fine speeches and parliamentary votes … but by blood and iron.” 1
—BISMARCK BEFORE THE LANDTAG’S APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE, 1862
“Mind you take care, that man [Bismarck]; he means what he says.” 2
—DISRAELI TO COUNT VITZTHUM VON ECKSTÄDT, JULY 1862
Otto von Bismarck was haunted by the past historical legacy of Frederick the Great, and personally determined now to restore Prussia in his own image. It was only fitting, then, that he had been born in one of the most historically significant years of the nineteenth century, 1815, just before Waterloo and the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte, the man who had laid waste to Prussia, his country, in 1806, and whom he was destined to avenge fifty-five years later.
Bismarck was a Junker, a member of the ruling landed Prussian aristocracy, born with a sword in hand and a brash natural sense of superiority that was to keep every prince in a state of obedient subjugation. Otto von Bismarck was the ultimate Junker, magnifying those class attitudes, qualities, and racial idiosyncrasies a thousandfold; indeed his arrogance in ultimately defying a hapless Prussian king Wilhelm I time and again, left him in a permanent state of intimidation and trepidation. As the Hohenzollern king admitted, if there was one man in the whole of Prussia he dreaded to be left alone in a room with, it was Bismarck.
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Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born at his father’s principal estate of Schönhausen, in Brandenburg, Saxony, on April 1, 1815, the son of Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck and Wilhelmine Louise Mencken. Otto’s father was remembered as open, kindly, indolent, and unpretentious—none of which were traits his famous son inherit. “I really loved my father,” Bismarck belatedly wrote long after his death, recalling “his truly boundless, unselfish, good-natured tenderness for me.”3 He was at the same time a country gentleman who preferred his hounds, fields, and forests to books, Bach, cities, and life at the royal court, values he did in fact share with his sons, including the Junker contempt of Jews, Catholics, and Poles—Bismarck was never to employ Polish labor on his extensive Pomeranian estates. As a boy, however, Otto had a very difficult relationship with his father. “I [later] felt remorse concerning my conduct toward him,” for having returned paternal kindness “with coldness and bad grace.”4 But his father had also bitterly recalled the old days at the time of Napoléon’s invasion of Prussia and of the destructive occupation of Schönhausen and the neighboring estates by the French army, and Prussians had a very long memory.
Bismarck described his mother, Wilhelmine Mencken—the daughter of the chief cabinet officer of the king—as “cold and unpleasant, though she was very intelligent.” There was nothing cheerful about his early years, and “as a small child I hated her.” Wilhelmine was both a strict Lutheran and insistent on the importance of a good education. Constantly at odds with his father, kept at a distance by his mother, young Bismarck grew up in blustering rebellion, and remained so the rest of his life. Even as a boy his temper tantrums terrified the stable hands. But he remained close to his simpler, unambitious elder brother, Bernhard, and later to his much younger sister, Malwine.5
He spent most of his youth at their perennially overcast, heavily forested Pomeranian estate of Kniephof before being sent away to boarding school. Both he and Bernhard attended the elite Friedrich Wilhelm and Gray Cloiser gymnasia in Berlin, before Otto matriculated to Göttingen University in 1832 to read law. Bismarck, then well over six feet tall and ever the Junker anti-intellectual, was a member now of the dueling society and primarily interested in establishing a reputation for himself as a fearsome swordsman. He challenged more than twenty students, his sword successfully prevailing in all instances.6 At Göttingen, Otto met an American student, a Bostonian who was to become a senior diplomat and one of his very few lifelong friends, John Lothrop Motley. More important, during the summer break, he was invited by a classmate, Moritz von Blanckenburg, to join him in a government topographical surveying project directed by his uncle, Lieutenant Albrecht von Roon. The usually prickly Bismarck got on very well with the handsome, formal army officer and his wife, Anna. As it turned out, Roon was to play a pivotal role in the career of Otto von Bismarck the statesman.7 Although not a Junker, Roon, the son of a Danish officer, had also suffered at the hands of Napoléon Bonaparte, who had left his father’s estate in ruins, and himself reduced to his army pay.
While serving his one-year annual army reserve service, Lieutenant Bismarck attended agricultural classes at the Greifswald College, and then completed his legal studies at Berlin. Foregoing a legal career for politics, Bismarck first served as an elected member of the local Landrat, or Diet (Assembly), where he quickly established a reputation for a sharp tongue, royalist views, and reactionary politics. When the reverberations of revolutionary France in 1848 reached and jolted Berlin, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to put down antigovernment demonstrations with military force, Bismarck carried out his first attempted coup, trying to convince Queen Augusta to replace her husband on the throne with their teenage son. An outraged Augusta rarely spoke to Bismarck again over the ensuing years.
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In 1851 the Prussian king appointed Bismarck envoy to the Diet of the German Confederation, in Frankfurt. There Bismarck’s reputation for a foul temper and stinging repartee in debate quickly raised him to prominence, as did yet another inevitable duel. With the now partially paralyzed Friedrich Wilhelm no longer capable of ruling Prussia, he appointed his younger brother, Wilhelm, to replace him as his regent, who in turn appointed Bismarck Prussian ambassador to St. Petersburg, a safe distance from the royal court and Berlin politics. Bismarck had to watch from the sidelines during Victor Emmanuel’s (and Louis Napoléon’s) Italian war for independence against Austria.
Meanwhile, Bismarck carried out a bitter correspondence with Berlin for refusing to promote him from lieutenant to major general, the usual rank for an ambassador. The theme of his struggle for military promotion was to continue for years. During Bismarck’s absence in Russia, Regent Wilhelm nominated Helmuth von Moltke to head the Prussian army as its new chief of staff, charged with completely reorganizing and modernizing that military machine, its equipment, and training, while introducing a whole new school of strategy and tactics. More important to Bismarck’s future was a second appointment, that of his friend, and now general, Albrecht von Roon, as minister of war.
Finally, in 1861, Bismarck received instructions from the Wilhelmstrasse to betake himself to Paris as Prussia’s new senior diplomatic representative, although without his wife, a humorless provincial lady who rarely appeared in public with him. Although he had met Louis Napoléon briefly during the Universal Exhibition of 1855, it was only after presenting his credentials at the Tuileries in May 1862 that he was to get to know the French emperor a little better as an imperial guest at St. Cloud.
At the end of June 1862, Bismarck was sent to London to study the mood and policies of the British government and to meet Prime Minister Palmerston and Foreign Minister Earl Russell, as well as a Conservative MP, Benjamin Disraeli. Before leaving London on the fourth of July, Bismarck attended a Russian diplomatic reception given by Ambassador Brunnow. The impression Bismarck gave here closely resembles that of another occasion witnessed by General Stosch: “It was the first time I saw Bismarck at a social occasion, and I must confess that the impression I got … nearly overwhelmed me. The clarity and grandeur of his views gave me the greatest pleasure. He was assured and fresh in every respect.”8
And that is precisely the impact he had on the former chancellor of the exchequer and future prime minister, Disraeli, during a forthright conversation at the Russian embassy, as Bismarck outlined his personal future political plans. He would be “compelled” to take over the leadership of the Prussian government, he modestly explained to an astonished Disraeli. “My first care will then be to reorganize the army,” and once that has been achieved, “I shall seize the first pretext to strike at Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and unify Germany under Prussian leadership.” Perhaps it was the vodka, but by any estimate it was an extraordinary thing to announce before the ambassadors of Austria and Russia, not to mention an influential English statesman. While a bemused Austrian Count Friedrich Vitzthum von Eckstädt later dismissed the Prussian’s remarks, a more perceptive Benjamin Disraeli warned: “Mind you take care, that man means what he says,” as history would well attest.9
Back in Paris that September of 1862, Ambassador Bismarck received a telegram unexpectedly recalling him to Berlin. The Prussian Diet had just refused to allow the king to reorganize the army, and at the strong urging of minister for war, Albrecht von Roon, the king had most reluctantly sent for Bismarck, appointing him minister-president of Prussia. Wilhelm needed all the powerful guns he could gather to support the reforms the army needed, and with Moltke, Roon, and Bismarck, he had a perfect troika behind him. “We are in the middle of a ministerial crisis,” Bismarck’s banker, Gerson von Bleichröder, informed banker James de Rothschild in Paris. “Herr von Bismarck-Schönhausen as the new Minister-President is occupied with forming a new cabinet.… an entirely reactionary government.” The highly influential Ludwig von Gerlach thought that was precisely what was needed at this critical hour. “However great my reservations are about Bismarck … I would not even dare to work against him, for the simple reason that I know of no other person better suited to the task.”10
Enormous pressure was applied to Wilhelm I, obliging him to act urgently on the defense of the country. Upon his return to Berlin, Minister-President Bismarck addressed the Appropriations Committee of the Landtag on the thirtieth of September 1862, giving his celebrated “blood and iron” challenge to the kingdom and the world: “Prussia must concentrate and maintain its power for the right moment to strike [to launch its armies].… for Prussia’s boundaries devised by the Vienna Treaties [of 1815] are not favorable to the healthy requirements of the nation,” he announced in a deceptively quiet conversational tone. “The great questions of our time are not going to be resolved by fine speeches and parliamentary votes.… but by blood and iron!”11
While the Junker officer corps toasted their new spokesman, this frank speech greatly worried many civilians, including the celebrated historian Heinrich von Treitschke. “When I hear so shallow a country-squire as this Bismarck chap boasting about the ‘blood and iron’ with which he intends to subdue the whole of Germany [the independent German states], the meanness of it seems to be exceeded only by the very absurdity of the idea.”12 However, Bismarck’s previous violent speeches and tactics within the government had not gone unnoticed, and concern over this first minister’s new agenda quickly spread. Nor was the first test of Bismarck’s intentions long in coming.
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When Denmark’s king Frederick VII died in November of 1863, there was some question as to who was to rule the two provincial Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. When Frederick’s successor, Christian IX, naturally claimed them for Denmark, Bismarck and Austria protested, demanding the return of Schleswig to Austria. Denmark refused, and Prussia and Austria successfully invaded and occupied the two provinces. A reluctant Austria agreed to give Schleswig to Prussia, while keeping Holstein for herself. When in 1866 Austria reneged, however, violating the Gastein Convention, Bismarck launched the Prussian army against his Austrian allies. Bismarck had already secured Prussia’s southern frontiers by forming a secret alliance with Italy’s Victor Emmanuel, thereby forcing the Austrians to divide their armies. The combined reorganization and modernization of the Prussian army now paid off, with Moltke defeating the Austrians at Königgrätz (Sadowa), and concluding with the Peace of Prague in 1866. The German Confederation was dissolved and Prussia annexed both Schleswig and Holstein, along with Frankfurt, Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, and Nassau. As for the new Kingdom of Italy, she was of course then rewarded with Venice (much to the satisfaction of Louis Napoléon).
True to his word, with “Blood and Iron,” Bismarck now forced the twenty-one smaller German states north of the River Main into joining a newly formed North German Confederation (1867), based largely on Napoléon Bonaparte’s old Confederation of the Rhine. Bismarck also personally drafted the new constitution governing this tightly knit, Prussian-style confederation. It was now controlled directly by the king of Prussia, a grateful Wilhelm I appointing Count von Bismarck his first chancellor, while the Reichstag and Bundesrat in Berlin governed the new confederation. Holding the dual post as Prussian chancellor and foreign minister, Bismarck effectively ruled all the states, while sealing them off from the outside world, much as Napoléon had done with his Confederation of the Rhine. A grateful Landtag awarded him a generous grant with which he acquired the 20,000-acre estate of Varzin, Pomerania (now in Poland). The bumptious Bismarck was toasted and fêted as a national hero, appearing from now on in the uniform of a general officer.
“We drank a lot of champagne,” German ambassador Kurd von Schlözer acknowledged. “There is no denying that people have always been impressed by his [Bismarck’s] dash and brilliance. From now on he is a man to be reckoned with!” “The scale of Bismarck’s triumph cannot be exaggerated,” biographer Jonathan Steinberg concedes. “He alone brought about a complete transformation of the European international order.” He alone had succeeded in unifying the German states, where all predecessors had failed. For the next twenty-eight years, Prussia and the German states were to be ruled by Otto von Bismarck, or as he modestly put it, “I have beaten them all, every one!”13
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That Bismarck had arrived at this astonishing position, equipped with overwhelming power and authority exceeding that of many a minor king or prince, was extraordinary, but then he was a phenomenon, a Prussian political Napoléon Bonaparte. As Steinberg points out, he had no army behind him, unlike Napoléon; he had no important political party behind him; and the public certainly did not like the man throughout most of his life. He had no parliamentary majority, and senior diplomats disliked and distrusted him. Moreover even “the Royal Family hated him” and King Wilhelm I always felt quite ill at ease in the great man’s presence. He feared his domination. Diplomats and heads of state alike vied with one another in attempting to understand this hulk of a Junker, but it was perhaps the British ambassador, Sir Robert Morier, who best summed up one of the abilities that so distinguished this backwoods Pomeranian squire from his opponents on the international stage. Bismarck, he said, was “a colossal chess player capable of the most daring combinations … and who will sacrifice everything, even his personal hatred, to the success of his game.”14
Bismarck even challenged Moltke frequently, two very strong-willed giants, neither man conceding to the other. Minister for Defense Albrecht von Roon alone remained Bismarck’s close friend and loyal ally.15 Nevertheless, it was those three men as a team who were ultimately capable of defeating even their most formidable opponents, as they were to prove time and again.
For all his demands of power and absolute obedience, Otto von Bismarck was the only first minister and foreign minister in Europe to live without palatial trappings, scores of servants, soldiers, and guards, and most certainly without the pomp and circumstance associated with formal government ministries. For a man of his formidable arrogance and power, this startled most foreigners, but not Germans. It represented the real Bismarck, the squire en ville.
Bismarck moved into the Prussian foreign ministry at 76 Wilhelmstrasse in the autumn of 1862, shortly after his appointment. Arriving at the age of forty-seven, he would remain here until 1890, leaving at the age of seventy-five, with a cane, a bald head, and white walrus mustache. Here he was to combine the offices of foreign minister and chancellor, directing the affairs of state and later of empire. Rather than an elaborate formal magisterial building, complete with Roman statues and Gobelin tapestries, number 76 was quite simply a large stone eighteenth-century private residence acquired by the government and converted into offices. Here Bismarck received his visitors in “a plain sparsely furnished office.”16 Despite the threats and assassination attempts on his life—one assassin shot him, hitting him five times—no soldiers stood guard before the entrance, nor even so much as a uniformed porter. For a man who always appeared in public in the uniform of a major general, this, too, seemed baffling. The Prussian legation in Athens was far more imposing.
Bismarck was as awesome in the dining room as he was in the chancellery. Dinner at 76 Wilhelmstrasse included at least seven very generous courses, the following being a typical evening’s menu: heaps of Baltic oysters, caviar, venison soup, trout, morel mushrooms, and smoked breast of goose, wild boar, a saddle of venison, apple fritters and cheese, topped off with full plates of marzipan, chocolate, and apples—and then of course there were the wines. Louis Napoléon preferred a variety of women, Bismarck a well-stocked larder, and of course there had been the usual fortifying lunch earlier that day. After such daily feats, of course he would complain. “I am sick to my stomach and have gall bladder problems … and have spent the entire night throwing up. My head feels like a glowing oven … I fear that I am about to lose my mind.”17
It is not unreasonable to attribute the much-dreaded Bismarck “rage” in some small measure to a perpetual state of indigestion, although his childhood resentment of a glacial mother always remained an underlying factor. Then of course the unending political rows with senior government officials, including the strong-willed Field Marshal von Moltke, proved an inevitable source of aggravation and frustration for him. But if on occasion he personally made a mistake, and it was discovered, he would invariably blame his staff. Otto von Bismarck was never wrong, especially when clashing with the military, accusing them of “seriously disrupting his own political agenda.” “The King fears Bismarck’s rages,” General von Storsch noted, “Moltke wraps his anger in aristocratic silence, and Roon becomes ill.”18
Despite the intensity of their particular relationship, two themes bound the three men, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke: unification of the German states (under Prussian control) and the continued development of the crack new Prussian army, for Bismarck was bent on creating an empire. And his long-term simmering antipathy to the Napoleonic legacy was always there, as it was for Roon, and to a lesser degree for Moltke. He was just waiting for the right moment to pounce.19
In the meantime Roon and Moltke were pressing steadily on, preparing the Prussian army and their new North German Confederate allies for a major war, honing in on “our well-trained, well-oiled [military] mechanism,” Crown Prince Friedrich Karl boasted.20 Depots were prepared, military commanders instructed in new tactics, strategy, and weapons while training the large new army reserves—new reserves the Legislative Body had opposed for France. And all was coordinated with up-to-date maps and carefully prepared mobilization and railway transport schedules. The Prussian general staff were the finest in Europe. France had done nothing equivalent, with inadequate reserves left untrained, and most of her commanders veterans of Algerian guerilla warfare, hardly competent to fight a modern, full-scale European engagement. Bismarck and Roon were just biding their time awaiting a pretext to attack.
Having largely achieved German unification, Bismarck could no longer afford to wait beyond 1870 to find his excuse for attacking France. He could not act, launch a war, without War Minister Roon at his side, but after fifty years’ service in the army he was ailing, a physical wreck, crippled by severe asthma who would be obliged to retire any day now. It would have to be 1870 at the very latest or never. Without Roon, Bismarck literally could not go to war. The final ornament needed to cap Bismarck’s career was the creation of the Reich, or Empire. And only the threat of war, of a besieged Fatherland, could induce the various German states to vote to accept this new empire.21 If Bismarck could somehow entice Louis Napoléon into declaring war against Prussia and the German states, all Germans, including the Bavarians, would automatically rally around a new imperial flag.
But first Louis Napoléon had to be prodded into declaring war against them. The year 1870 would be critical for Otto von Bismarck, “the right moment to strike,” as he put it. A “Krieg-in-Sicht” atmosphere enthralled the country, and one German paper declared, Prussia was “On a War Watch.”