Otto von Bismarck and Theodor Fontane were contemporaries in an almost exact sense. Bismarck, the son of an ancient noble family with estates in Pomerania and Brandenburg, was born on 1 April 1815 in Schönhausen, Brandenburg, and died at Friedrichsruh, not far from Hamburg, on 31 July 1898. Fontane, the son of an apothecary, was born in Neuruppin, Brandenburg, on 30 December 1819 and died on 24 September 1898 in Berlin. They were both, therefore, true witnesses of the century, their conscious lives extending from the age of romanticism through the convulsions of 1848 and the thoroughgoing reconstruction of the European balance of power in the 1860s to the age of imperialism and materialism and its attendant political, social, and psychological changes.
Although there is no record of their ever having met and exchanged ideas—we can hardly count Fontane’s formal introduction to the former chancellor by the chief editor of the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on 2 February 18911—there are some curious correspondences between their lives. Each was marked by a strong sense of individuality and the desire, as Bismarck put it when he terminated his career as a fledgling civil servant in 1839, “to make the kind of music I like or none at all,”2 although Fontane did not have the financial means to realize that goal until 1876, when he finally severed his connection with the government service. Both entered upon the public stage during the revolutionary troubles of 1847–1849, although on opposite sides of the barricades. The Landjunker Bismarck, who threatened to arm his peasants and march upon Berlin to defend the king against the revolution, laid the foundation of his later political career by his eloquent and reactionary speeches in the United Landtag of 1847 and as a deputy of the extreme right in the new Landtag of 1849; Fontane played a more modest role as a radical journalist seeking to defend the revolution by means of his pen. In the years that followed, there was, at least on the surface, a convergence of their political positions. When Otto von Manteuffel headed a reactionary regime in Prussia during the Crimean War, Bismarck was ambassador to the federal diet in Frankfurt am Main, where he strongly opposed, and eventually defeated, Austria’s attempt to persuade the German states to join it in intervening in the war on the side of France and Great Britain. At the same time, Fontane was a government press representative in London, where he sought to allay British indignation over the results of the neutrality policy that Bismarck had promoted, and largely designed. After his return from England at the end of the 1850s, Fontane worked for the Kreuzzeitung, the newspaper of the extreme right and the staunch supporter of Bismarck’s policies during the conflict with Prussian liberalism that followed his assumption of the minister presidency in September 1862. And, in the subsequent period, while Bismarck was the chief architect of the unification process, Fontane was not only an admirer and supporter of his diplomacy but also, as we have seen, the historian of the wars that resulted from it.
The lives of the two men impinged directly upon each other on only one occasion, and that was when Fontane was collecting materials for his history of the war against France. In October 1870 his passion for history overcoming common sense, he crossed from the Prussian war zone into French territory because he wanted to see the birthplace of Joan of Arc and was captured by francs-tireurs and imprisoned on charges of espionage.3 In this dangerous pass (whenever in later life Fontane discussed his predicament with Prussian soldiers, they always told him “If we had captured you, you would have been shot!”),4 it was Bismarck who came to his assistance. In an official note, he asked the United States minister to France, Elihu B. Wash-burne, to intervene with the French government in behalf of “Dr. Fontane, a Prussian subject and well-known historian,” who had been arrested while on “a scientific trip” and was being held at Besançon at the risk of his life. Such measures against “a harmless scholar,” Bismarck added, were unjustified, and he requested that Washburne make it clear to the French government that, if Fontane were not released, Prussia would retaliate by subjecting French subjects who were caught in similar circumstances to the same treatment.5 Wash-burne acted in this sense, and Fontane was released.
Whether Bismarck even remembered the incident in the days when Fontane had become a well-known novelist, we do not know; nor is there any evidence that he had ever read any of Fontane’s novels. This is not because the chancellor had no interest in, or time for, literature. Compared with the politicians of our day, who rarely give any indication of reading anything but public opinion polls, Bismarck was remarkably well read. In his speeches he quoted frequently from Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare, and less so from Horace, Gellert, Uhland, Scheffel, and the Irish poet Thomas Moore. His favorite poet was Schiller. Goethe he considered to have been a bureaucrat, more interested in court preferments than in literature, and his poetry, especially the second part of Faust, often unintelligible. He was particularly fond of the lyric poets of his youth, and his friend the Baroness vom Spitzemberg has written that each of his residences was provided with the works of Chamisso, Uhland, Rückert, and Heine, and that on his desk, among his state papers, one or more of these could always be found. He knew and had read the historians Taine and Mommsen and Ranke, and was on friendly terms with the last of these, and he was remarkably knowledgeable about foreign writers, admiring George Eliot and considering Turgenev the greatest writer of the modern age. But although, among contemporary works, he had read Spielhagen’s Problematische Naturen, Freytag’s Soll und Haben and the platt-deutsch novels of Fritz Reuter,6 and although he may have known Fontane’s verse, or at least those poems that Fontane dedicated to him, as well as his war books, which Fontane sent to him,7 he had never, as far as we know, read any of Fontane’s novels, which is a shame, for it would have been interesting to know what his reaction was to his own not infrequent appearances in them.
One literary distinction that the two men had in common was the ability to write letters that brought pleasure not only to their recipients but also—after their posthumous publication—to thousands of other readers as well. When Thomas Mann, in a famous essay, wrote in 1910, “No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of [Fontane’s] letters, in every snatch of his dialogue,”8 he was not only speaking for many of his own contemporaries who were discovering the charms of Fontane’s letters to his family and friends, but was also unconsciously echoing the enthusiasm of earlier readers of the letters of Fontane’s great contemporary. In 1869, when a number of Bismarck’s personal and political letters appeared for the first time in Hesekiel’s Buch vom Grafen Bismarck, the novelist and playwright Paul Heyse wrote, “If this gentleman, instead of busying himself with politics, would enter into the field of novel-writing, he would be considered as an earnest competitor for the favor of the public.”9 And Fontane himself wrote to Georg Friedla nder in 1890, “Bismarck had no greater admirer than I; my wife never read me one of his speeches or letters or sayings without my feeling a real enchantment.”10
It is interesting to compare these two masters of the epistolary art. Of Fontane’s letters, it is those of his old age that have the greatest appeal to the general reader, a fact that led Thomas Mann to the eccentric view that the letters of Fontane’s early and middle years are inconsiderable, and that he had to grow old in order to become himself.11 Bismarck’s letters, laden with political concerns in his later years, became progressively less attractive to the nonspecialist. The chancellor, who from his youth onward had enjoyed letting himself go in letters to friends and colleagues, was conscious of this development, and lamented that politics was the bane of letter writing and that the big trout in his pools ate up all of the more attractive little fish.12 But the letters of his youth and early maturity often startle and move us by the brilliance of their language and their range of mood and feeling. This is true, for example, of the exuberance of his letters to his Göttingen friend Scharlach, like the one in which he describes his decision to devote himself to a life in the country and to become
a well-fed Landwehr officer with a moustache, who curses and swears a justifiable hatred of Frenchmen and Jews until the earth trembles, and beats his dogs and servants in the most brutal fashion, even if he is tyrannized by his wife. I will wear leather trousers and allow myself to be ridiculed at the Wool Market in Stettin, and when anyone calls me Herr Baron I’ll stroke my moustache in good humor and sell two dollars cheaper. On the King’s birthday I’ll get drunk and shout “Vivat!” and in general get excited a lot and my every third word will be “On my honor!” and “A superb horse!” In short, I shall be happy in my family’s rural circle, car tel est mon plaisir.13
And few readers can fail to be moved by the tenderness and passion of his letters to his betrothed, Johanna von Puttkamer, with their not infrequent shift into the didactic or the romantic mode or—most astonishing, because unexpected in a man who came to live for politics—by his ability to convey the appearance and the feel of landscape, the impression of light and shadow in the woods, the way the sun and the spume played on the bosom of the sea, the quiet of the park in Schönhausen on a long summer afternoon, an art which the author of the Wanderings never mastered, perhaps because he was always more interested in people than in nature.
Bismarck’s letters as a young diplomat are marked by a precision of language that reflects both a cheerful self-confidence and a sense of amusement at the doubts of his elders, as in a famous letter to Leopold von Gerlach after a trip to Paris:
You criticize me for having been in Babylon, but you surely cannot demand of a diplomat hungry for knowledge the kind of political chastity that sits so well on a soldier like Lützow or on an independent country gentleman. In my opinion, I must learn to know the elements in which I have to move, and I must do so by my own observation as far as opportunities present themselves to me. Don’t fear for my political health as I do so. I have much of the nature of a duck, from whose feathers the water drains, and in my case it is a pretty long way from the outer skin to the heart.14
As for the letters of the years after he had become the king’s chief adviser, they have the power to reveal, sometimes by what appears to be a chance remark or a laconic reference, the dangers and responsibilities of his calling—“One really learns in this trade that one can be as clever as the clever ones of this world and yet at any time find oneself in a moment like a child in the dark”—or, with shattering immediacy, its sacrifices, as in the letter to his friend Albrecht von Roon in December 1872, in which he wrote, “Sitting in the saddle, the king hardly realizes that I am a good horse that he has ridden to pieces; the lazy ones hold up better.”15 And surely it would be difficult to find, among the letters of the chancellor’s contemporaries, a more eloquent definition of the ethos of statecraft, couched in language as simple and forthright, than his reply to a letter criticizing him for ruthlessness in his conduct toward his antagonists.
Would to God that I did not have other sins upon my soul besides those the world knows of. As a statesman I am not ruthless enough but rather cowardly in my feelings; and this is so because it isn’t always easy in the questions that come to me to win that clarity in whose soil grows confidence in God. Anyone who reproaches me for being a politician without conscience does me an injustice and should sometime try out his own conscience on this battlefield.16
Fontane’s letters had none of the demonic quality that often characterized Bismarck’s. If the latter bring intimations from the world of politics and the never-ending acrobatics of the balance-of-power system, Fontane’s deal with the private sphere, with life in the big city or in the seaside or mountain resorts where the German middle classes spent the summer months. Their focus is on the routines and problems and petty dramas of domestic life, on the ways in which professional preferment and social status impinge upon the relations between individuals and groups, on the discoveries and disappointments that are made along the way, and, of course, on the press, the theater, and the world of literature of which he was himself a part. Fontane’s role is that of the interested but detached observer, amused but always a bit appalled by the examples of human impercipience and folly that come to his attention, but eager to be helpful by passing on the fruits of his own experience in the hope that they may be helpful. The moral earnestness of Bismarck’s letter to the critic of his treatment of his antagonists is hard to come by in Fontane. Taken as a whole, his letters may be described as an example of gossip in the grand style and, appropriately enough, his style is easy and relaxed and generally conversational in tone. But Thomas Mann has noted an unmistakable affiliation to the ballad in phraseology and diction and has made the point that, despite first appearances, the prose of the letters is carefully chosen and controlled, and that even the most casual of them has an inner form and discipline.17
This in itself makes it a pleasure to browse in Fontane’s letters, quite apart from the treasures that fall in one’s lap as one does so. Of these last there are many that might be listed under various headings. For example, genius:
Genius I define thus: disturbed balance of powers. Dahse is a genuine genius, that is, a marvel and a numbskull at the same time. This mastery of one specific power at the expense of others makes the normal genius. There is to be sure still the abnormal genius, whom we should perhaps call real demigods, natures of such universal superiority that admiration follows them everywhere, and they would have discovered perpetual motion or climbed down from the moon on a rope if they were not busy writing “Hamlet” or crossing the Alps with elephants.18
Or his growing misanthropy:
I am not inimical to people but shy of them and that comes from my displeasure with my literary colleagues . . . who seem to be recruited from rascals. Of course this complaint is an old one, and every dying generation has spoken this way, but even so, just as it is true that nations change, so do professions. The French, once so well-behaved, are now insolent, and the same distinction can be applied to the young generation of writers. All modesty is gone from the world, and in some quarters the atmosphere is such that one might think one was in the gold mines of California.19
Or the difficulty of making vacation plans:
If you book for 8 days, you can be sure of being able to stay comfortably in the place in question for 8 weeks or even 18. If, on the other hand, you book for 18 weeks something gets in the way after 18 hours: you get sick, or someone else gets sick, or a prince wants to take you to Italy, or a publisher or a newspaper editor writes that for a report on this or that inaugural or memorial ceremony (location Petersburg or Stockholm) he will pay you, with free travel costs, 1000 Mark. . . . Fate hates it when people plan something in advance.20
Or popular songs:
Faucher said to me on an unforgettable day when we went on a pub crawl through half a dozen London taverns and coffee shops, “Yes, there’s something odd about the fame of poets. You know, there’s that song from the last century: Und wenn der Große Friedrich kommt Und klopft nur auf die Hosen, Reiß aus die ganze Reichsarmee, Panduren und Franzosen. Now, what do you think? What kind of a face would old Gleim have made if someone had said to him then, “Yes, lieber Kanonikus, when your famous Grenadier Songs are forgotten, that Gassenhauer will still live!”21
Or small gratifications:
The famous niece’s wedding—which, I should add, will take place here in Berlin—comes on the 14th, Polterabend on the 12th. Everybody is out of sorts and angry at each other. The father of the bride, however, is firm in his belief that the whole affair can be brought into shape with a little bag of prallinés and a bouquet of flowers, so that the “genuinely poetic” will come into its own. He may not be wholly wrong. If they can find three reserve lieutenants and there is dancing, everything in the end will dissolve into delight and later generations will speak of the wonderful day, when there was mock turtle soup that nevertheless was “genuine.”22
Every lover of Fontane has his own favorite list of such gems. In my own, Fontane’s description of his first acquaintance with Parzifal, in a performance at Bayreuth that he decided at the last moment to forgo, ranks very high.
It is now nine o’clock, and when I think that Parzifal will not be over, at the very earliest, for another hour, then I don’t know how I would have stood these aeons inside the theater. I heard the overture and, as I left, had a glimpse of the first scene. Then I strolled slowly back to the hotel (quite a distance) and did some reading; and then I went into town and had coffee in the teahouse near the big bridge (across from the garrison) and then for a second time at the much talked-about Sammet’s, because I had to have something to do. Then back to the hotel, where I wrote two letters. These I took to the post office and then went for a walk for half an hour. Then I read, back at the hotel again, for a whole hour and then had my supper and tea in my room—Parzifal, despite all this, is far from being over. The 1500 who were there today will have to be marvelously healthy people or in three days time—for it’s raining and is dead cold—750 of them will have catarrh, diarrheoa, stomach flu, and rheumatism. The impassioned man can withstand anything; for my part, I am almost sad that while traveling, and perhaps at other times too, I have always been a weakling.23
There is, of course, much more to be found in the letters than trivia of this sort. They are the best source for information about Fontane’s marriage and his family, about his financial problems before he became a successful author, about his many friends from the early days of the Tunnel until those in which he was a leading supporter of modernism in the German theater, about his changing views on German society and culture, his disenchantment with the Prussian aristocracy and his deepening awareness of the frailties of the German bourgeoisie. About politics, as we shall see, they have less to say, but about the greatest man of politics of his age a great deal. In a curious way, Bismarck is the dominating figure in Fontane’s letters, with whom he is always in contention, forever seeking to define his historical stature and significance for German life and, above all, to clarify and justify his own feelings about him.
Fontane was not allowed to confine his thoughts about the great man to the privacy of his diaries. After 1870, Bismarck’s stature was such that his birthdays, and the anniversaries of his greatest achievements, were the subject of official commemoration. When this happened, it was not uncommon for Fontane, as the country’s most distinguished writer of ballads, to be called on to crown the occasion with verse.
It cannot be said that the poet took great pleasure in this or that his efforts to meet his obligations are among his best poetry. Fontane was always a virtuoso when it came to writing birthday odes and other vers d’occasion for his friends, but he was not comfortable when asked to provide something of the same sort for a public or official ceremony, which, he felt, not only invited the stereotypical but made it all but inevitable. Too much was always expected of the poet in such circumstances. It was one thing for him, in pursuit of his private career, to write a ballad about Marshal Keith or the old Derffling, for his readers had no private commitment to such subjects and, if he did his job right, were likely to be surprised and charmed. But in the case of the chancellor, the same people who always “knew everything better than Bismarck”24 also knew exactly what kind of poems should be written in his honor and were loud in their disapproval when their standards were not met. Fontane was always reluctant to accept responsibility for such productions, and his doubts before the fact were generally justified.
The two odes written for Bismarck’s seventieth birthday in April 1885 suffer from this unease. “Jung-Bismarck,” which was published in Paul Lindau’s Nord und Süd, was apparently intended to accompany a picture of Bismarck in his nineteenth year. It begins with a stanza of such startling triteness that few readers can have felt much inducement to read further:
In Lockenfülle das blonde Haar,
Allzeit im Sattel und neunzehn Jahr,
Im Fluge weltein und nie züruck—
Wer ist dem Reiter nach dem Glück?
Jung-Bismarck.
[His blond hair in thick locks,
Always in the saddle, nineteen years old,
Rushing ahead and never back,
Who is it that rides after fortune?
Young Bismarck.]
For those who might want to continue, the poet inquires after the nature of the Fortune that the youth is pursuing and then—after providing glimpses of Germania at the fountain holding out the full and empty jars and the coronation at Versailles—concludes with the crashing commonplace that it consists in living and dying for the fatherland.25
Fontane himself seems to have felt the inadequacy of this and composed another poem for the occasion called “Zeus in Mission.” In this, regrettably, he took refuge in discursiveness and jocularity, telling a story of how the Almighty God looks down upon Germany in the latter half of the year 1862 and finds it torn and divided and wasting its energies on worthless causes. To shake it out of this moral confusion, he commissions Zeus, the father of the Olympian gods, to go to earth and restore law and order and overthrow all of Germany’s enemies. This Zeus accomplishes, apparently by the simple device of shaking his brows so that they sound like thunder.
Und war’s nicht Donner, waren es Kanonen.
Missunde, Düppel. Hurra, weiter, weiter:
Nußschalen schwimmen auf dem Alsensunde.
Hin über Lippa stürmen die Geschwader,
Ein Knäul von Freund und Feind. Da seht ihn selbst,
Der mit dem Helm ist’s und dem Schwefelkragen.
Und Spichern, Wörth und Sedan. Weiter, weiter,
Und durchs Triumphtor triumphierend führt er
All Deutschland in das knirschende Paris.26
[But it wasn’t thunder, it was cannon.
Missunde, Düppel. Hurrah! Farther, farther!
Boats like nut shells on the Alsen sound.
Up over Lipa storm the squadrons,
A tangle of friend and foe. Look! There he is himself.
The one with the helmet and the sulfur collar.
And Spicheren, Wörth and Sedan! Farther, farther!
And through the gate of triumph triumphantly he leads
All Germany into teeth-gnashing Paris.]
This was no improvement over the earlier poem. The portrayal of Bismarck in the uniform of the Halberstadt Kürassiers, which he had worn during the battle of Königgra tz in 1866, was probably Fontane’s way of escaping the necessity of defining his attitude to the Bismarck of more recent years, who, as we shall see, no longer seemed as heroic to him as he once had. But, in any case, as Reuter has written, neither the form of the poem nor the reversion at the end to a kind of patriotic verse that was no longer fashionable was appropriate to the occasion.27
The memorial poem “Where Bismarck Should Lie,’ ” written after Bismarck’s death at the end of July 1898, with its simple message that the chancellor should be buried in the woods that he loved, is an improvement on the birthday odes, although weakened by its mythological trappings and the appearance of Widukind as deus ex machina.28 In view of all this, one is almost forced to the conclusion that the best of all of the Bismarck poems is one that Fontane wrote in 1892 and called “Ja, das möcht’ ich noch erleben.” It is about the repetitions in life and the fact that, despite them, there is always something that one would still like to experience.
Hin stirbt alles, ganz geringe
Wird der Wert der ird’schen Dinge;
Doch wie tief herabgestimmt
Auch das Wünschen Abschied nimmt,
Immer klingt es noch daneben:
Ja, das möcht’ ich noch erleben.
[Everything dies away. Insignificant
Is the value of earthly things.
And yet, although my capacity for wishing
Diminishes in deep depression,
There is always an accompanying thought:
Yes! I would still like to find out about that.]
And chief among those desiderata, he admits in the poem’s first lines, are those political surprises that he has enjoyed through the years.
Eigentlich ist mir alles gleich,
Der eine wird arm. der andre wird reich,
Aber mit Bismarck—was wird das noch geben?
Das mit Bismarck, das möcht’ ich noch erleben.29
[Everything is really all the same to me.
One person becomes poor; the other rich.
But with Bismarck—what’s going to come out of that?
That business about Bismarck—I’d still like to find out about that.]
This, of course, is a poem not about Bismarck but about Fontane.
At Eastertide in 1871 Fontane set off to northern France and Alsace to complete the trip that had been interrupted by his apprehension by francs-tireurs the previous October. In the train from Strassburg to Saverne (which had just been renamed Zabern), he fell into conversation with an elderly man in a pepper-and-salt suit who seemed to him at first from his appearance and accent to be a Swabian landowner. The versatility of his conversation and the penetration of his remarks about art and literature hinted, however, at something more than that, and Fontane could not resist introducing himself, whereupon he learned that his fellow traveler was Friedrich Theodor Vischer, author of Kritische Gänge and Aesthetik, oder Wissensschaft des Schönen and professor at Zurich and Tübingen.
In the two days that followed, the two men canvassed many subjects and, naturally, did not neglect the tremendous changes taking place in France and Germany. Vischer said that he hated all particularism, especially that of the Guelfs, and had an unconditional passion for the year 1870 and the building up of the German Reich. It was only the architect who displeased him. “It pains me that it should be precisely Bismarck who succeeded. I wrote recently that Germany, after the German Michel had wooed her in vain with his songs, fell finally to the boldness of a Prussian Junker. He grabbed and had her.”
“Let us assume,” [Fontane] said laughing, “that it will turn out with Germany as it did with the Sabine women. They were thoroughly happy—and Romans were born.”30
In the years after 1871, Bismarck was widely regarded as the man without whom the Reichsgründung would have been inconceivable, the hero of the hour whose name was on everyone’s lips. He was also, because little known or understood, a figure of mystery, an incalculable force in politics, and hence a source, to the old ruling class, the professions, and the propertied, of speculation, controversy, suspicion, even apprehension. Fontane’s conversation with Friedrich Theodor Vischer was certainly not the first or the last that he had that illustrated the way in which the chancellor’s name divided the spirits, and as his mind turned to what became his Berlin novels, he conceived the idea of introducing Bismarck into them, not in the flesh, as an actual person, reacting with the other characters in the story, but as someone who, though never seen, always there. Much later, he wrote to Maximilian Harden, “In nearly everything that I have written since 1870, ‘the Sulphur-Yellow [der Schwefelgelbe]’ goes around and, although the conversation touches him only fleetingly, the talk is always of him as of Charles or Otto the Great.”31
As a literary device, this had great advantages. It was an effective and economical way of giving the novels contemporaneity and verisimilitude and of demonstrating, as part of their general setting, an important psychological characteristic of the years after the founding of the Reich, namely, the strong influence of the chancellor’s personality and policies upon Germans of all classes, leading many of them to try to imitate what they admired in him. Both Van der Straaten in L’Adultera and Treibel in Frau Jenny Treibel have marked Bismarck traits, which they cultivate. Moreover, what the characters in the novels have to say about Bismarck and his policies proved to be an excellent means of defining their personalities and interests and prejudices, thus advancing the story while allowing the author to remain relatively detached.
The first example of this is L’Adultera, which is set in the mid-1870s, at the height of the postwar speculative boom, the Prussian government’s attack on Roman Catholicism, and the war scare with France. In this first, and not entirely successful, of his Berlin novels, Fontane’s concern was with the element of play (Spiel), in the double sense of gambling and unserious behavior, and the problem of originality and integrity in a society that preferred copies or types. He used the topos Bismarck to place these themes before his readers. At a dinner party in the Van der Straaten home, the host, a businessman who has profited richly from the boom times of the first postwar years, offers to make a wager with his brother-in-law, who is a member of the Prussian General Staff corps, that there will be a war, presumably with France, within two months. His brother-in-law replies calmly that this is highly unlikely and that the only problem his colleagues are studying at the moment is the likely theater of a purely hypothetical war between Great Britain and Russia. One of the other guests, a police councilor, supports the Generalstäbler by bringing Bismarck’s name into play. The chancellor, he says, is too good a judge of risks to think of war in current circumstances. Having risked everything on three different occasions, in 1864, 1866, and 1870, and won each time, he would hardly be likely to play the six-le-va.
This is hotly contested by a retired counselor of legation, Baron Duquede, who mounts a remarkable attack upon the chancellor as a highly overrated man whose tremendous success is driving him toward new risks and encouraging a dangerous hero cult in the country.
Yes, my friend, we have the hero cult. . . . statues and monuments are already there, and the temple will come. And his likeness will be in this temple, with the goddess Fortune at his feet. But it won’t be called the Temple of Fortune, but the Temple of Luck. . . . Everything is gambling and luck, with no trace of enlightenment, of thought, or above all of great creative ideas.
He accuses Bismarck of professing, under the guise of conservatism, a revolutionary radicalism and of being “a Ghengis Khan” who operates with ideas that he has looted from others. “I warn you against being deceived,” the baron cries, “and above all against overestimation of this false knight, this crusader of luck, in whom the stupid mob believes because he has driven the Jesuits out of the land. And how does it stand with that? We are rid of the evil ones, but the Evil One remains.”32
Duquede is encouraged by his host who, although a Bismarck admirer himself, has too much of the Berliner’s delight in pulling down the great to come to the chancellor’s defense. But the discussion shifts to other subjects, leaving the themes of gambling and imitation in the air, to play their part out in the plot.
In the novel Cecile, the same device is used to give a temporal setting to the story and to the nature of the society in which the heroine, the former mistress of a royal personage, is now forced to live, a fronde of the resentful naysayers in a world that has left them behind. Here, once more at a dinner party, a Geheimrat Hedemeyer, a former official in the Ministry of Culture who, despite strenuous efforts to ingratiate himself with the new minister Adalbert Falk by his pamphlets against the Catholic Church, has not managed to regain his position, vents his spite upon Bismarck. The chancellor, he declares, with an incoherent rage that arouses the delight of his reactionary tablemates, is “a Dalai-Lama” who requires veneration of all his ideas (like his religious policy, which, he insists, has no consistency and will result in the victory of Rome). He is also “an Omni-potenz” who is intent on stamping out all freedom of opinion, as is shown by his recent dismissal and persecution of the ambassador in Paris, Count Harry Arnim, who disagreed with his policy toward France.33
The Arnim case is raised again in Irrungen, Wirrungen, in a scene of great comic force, in which the protagonist, Baron Botho von Rienäcker, a lieutenant in the Kaiser Cürassiers stationed in Berlin, is faced with the necessity of having lunch at the famous restaurant Hiller with his uncle from the provinces, a man of decidedly conservative views. He invites a friend named Wedel, a lieutenant of the Dragoon Guards, to join them, hoping in this way to prevent the conversation from taking an undesirable turn. The plan does not work. A chance remark of Botho’s is interpreted by his uncle as being a slur against his former Rittmeister, Edwin von Manteuffel, later chief of the Military Cabinet and an opponent of Bismarck, and this is enough to elicit from him an apoplectic assault upon the chancellor as a “pen-pusher [Feder-fuchser].” “But pen-pushers” he says, “didn’t make Prussia great. Was the victor at Fehrbellin a pen-pusher? Was the victor at Leuthen a pen-pusher? Was Blücher a pen-pusher or Yorck? Here sits the Prussian pen. I can’t stand this cult!”
When Both gets him quieted down, his uncle addresses himself to Wedel and asks his opinion of Bismarck’s treatment of Harry Arnim. Tactfully Wedel suggests that in matters of high politics, the weaker party is well advised not to try to cross the plans of the stronger. Unless, he adds, his motives are completely pure and his convictions noble, in which he has a duty to take a stand of his own. But this was not true in the case of Arnim. This answer impresses the uncle, and he says that it will impress his pastor at home, and that leads him to draw Botho into a discussion of problems there and to raise the very question Botho had hoped to avoid, the family expectation that he will make up his mind to marry the rich cousin who is waiting for his proposal. He puts the matter so urgently that Botho realizes that his idyllic affair with Lene, a girl from the people, must now come to an end.34
Most of the people in Fontane’s novels who talk about Bismarck are critical of him (the exception is Instettin in Effi Briest, who works for him and admires him), and his figure seems to invite historical comparison with tyrants and violent men. Baron Duquede thinks of him as a Ghenghis Khan, Geheimrat Hedemeyer as a Dalai Lama; the old general in Die Poggenpuhls, taken to the theater to see a performance of Ernst von Wildenbruch’s Die Quitzows, thinks immediately of Bismarck as he watches the story of the great rebel chief Dietrich von Quitzow unfold, and he says so during the pause to his nephew, not without attracting the attention of other patrons. “Remarkable! Just like Bismarck! And in addition, as fate would have it, born next door to each other. I think you could shoot from Schönhausen to Quitzövel with an air rifle, and a rural post man could get there in a morning. Wonderful region, the country there; the land of the Langobards. Yes, where it sits, there it sits. What do you think, Leo?”35
Bismarck has a final incarnation in Fontane’s last novel, Der Stechlin, in a conversation between old Dubslav Stechlin and Count Barby that takes place after the death of Emperor Frederick III. Barby argues that, but for his fatal illness, the emperor would have been successful in inaugurating a liberal era in Germany. Dubslav expresses the strongest doubt, arguing that the Junkers would have prevented this.
It seems to me as if our blessed Quitzows have risen once more from the grave. And when that happens, when our people think about things that they have not thought about for four hundred years, then something can happen. People always say, “Impossible!” Bah, what is impossible? Nothing is impossible. Who would have said before the 18th of March that the 18th of March was possible, possible in this true and unadulterated philistine nest Berlin? Everything has its turn one time or another, and that should not be forgotten. And the army! Nun ja. Who will say anything against the army? But every successful general is always a danger. And, given the circumstances, others too. Think of the old Sachsenwalder, our civilian Wallenstein. God knows what he would have done in the end.
“And you believe,” interjected the Count, “that Emperor Frederick would have failed at this sharp Quitzow corner?”
“I think so.”36
How much of this, if any, represented Fontane’s own thinking about Bismarck? Probably very little, since these were fictional figures whose opinions depended upon their roles in the novels. But what were Fontane’s own views of the political issues that moved his characters so strongly? This is not easy to determine, because he has left us little to go on.
It is difficult, for example, to discover what Fontane thought about the chancellor’s policies during the decade of the 1870s. About the Kulturkampf, which Bismarck himself, in a speech in the Prussian Chamber of Peers in March 1873, declared to be an example of “the age-old struggle for power, as old as the human race itself, between kingship and the priestly caste,”37 there is, apart from a fleeting reference to the new Prussian School Law,38 nothing in the letters, and we learn no more about Fontane’s views about this conflict and its effects than we do from the references to it in the novels. The same is true concerning Bismarck’s efforts to destroy social democracy, which were to have profound effects upon German politics until the chancellor’s dismissal in 1890. In June 1878, to be sure, in a letter to his wife, Fontane expressed doubts whether any campaign of the sort could succeed, pointing out:
Millions of workers are as clever, as educated and as honorable as the aristocracy and the middle class, often superior to them. . . . Allof these people are completely equal to us and therefore it is impossible to prove that “they are insignificant” or that we have to deal with them with weapons in hand. They don’t represent only disorder and insurrection; they represent ideas, which are in part justified and can’t be beaten to death or dispelled from the world by imprisonment. They have to be fought by intellectual means and, as things stand, that is very difficult.39
This is a sensible view, but it is not one that Bismarck chose to accept. Why, then, did Fontane not come back to it as the antisocialist policy was elaborated? For the fact is that he didn’t.
Perhaps part of the answer is that Fontane’s interest in politics was always sporadic and never marked by consistency. He had, after all, other things to do, and during the 1870s his intellectual resources were absorbed by his labors on the last of the war books and his plans for his first novel. But it may also be that he never felt comfortable when his views opposed those of Bismarck, whom he regarded as a hero and as the historical figure of his age and hence entitled to a certain freedom from criticism. Commenting on a remark of Menzel’s to the effect that someone “didn’t have enough Grütze in her pot,” Fontane once wrote that whether this was a permissible remark depended on Menzel’s stature. If he was merely a good painter, then he shouldn’t say it, but if he were “of the very first rank, an epoch-making Number 1, a nonpareil,” then he ought to say it. “It’s like our Reich chancellor, he went on. “If his name were Schnökel or Hasemann, then he would have to heed the president’s bell, but if his name is Bismarck, he doesn’t have to do so.”40
Elaborating on this idea in March 1881, when Bismarck forced Count Botho von Eulenburg, the Prussian minister of the interior, out of office, Fontane wrote:
Bismarck is a despot, but he has a right to be one, and he must be one. If he were not, if he were an ideal parliamentarian, who allowed his course to be determined by the most stupid thing there is, by parliamentary majorities, then we wouldn’t have a chancellor at all, and least of all a German Reich. It is true on the other hand, of course, that under such a despot only dependent natures and powers of the second and third rank can serve, and that any free man will do well at times to resign. In doing that, the free man does what is right for him, but the chancellor also does what is right for him when he doesn’t allow that to cause confusion in his action or inaction.41
This is hardly a model of political ratiocination, and it doesn’t say much for the depth of Fontane’s faith in democratic institutions; but it does show that ten years after the unification of Germany Fontane was perfectly happy in leaving the direction of national politics in the hands of the man he considered to have been the founder of the Reich. “When he sneezes or says Prosit,” he wrote a little later, “I find it more interesting that the spoken wisdom of six Progressives.”42
At the same time, however, he was troubled by the fact that the chancellor’s authority was being eroded not by his politics but by faults of character, and particularly by his tendency to suspect associates and coworkers. His once enormous popularity was receding, he wrote in April 1881, and people were beginning to say that he was “a great genius but a small man.”43 As Bismarck became more irascible in the treatment of his political opponents, Fontane began to revise his earlier view about the appropriateness of his despotic behavior. One had the feeling, he wrote in 1887, “that he believes he is permitted to do anything, like a god, and he operates on [Paul] Lindau’s principle that a kick from the Duke of Ratibor is better than a kiss from Bleichro der.”44
Even so, as Germany moved into the confusion and tragedy of the year of the three emperors, and it became clear to any detached observer that Bismarck’s term of office was now nearing its end, Fontane almost instinctively rallied to his side. When a liberal newspaper speculated about the chancellor’s diminished position under the new emperor Frederick III, he exploded with rage and wrote to his daughter: “After the greatest political achievement in a millennium (for Frederick’s was smaller and Napoleon’s more fleeting) to have to be told by a Jewish rascal, behind whom unfortunately many, many stand: He was only a ‘servant’ and can, if he is nice and polite, remain in his servant’s position. Unheard of! Frightful! . . . Now they will all creep out of their swamps and holes and make their monkey business with him and tell him that it serves him right!”45 The campaign that was conducted against Bismarck in court circles at the end of Frederick’s short reign and more strenuously after the accession of William II, he found demeaning, and he wrote to his friend Georg Friedla nder that “at the last” he stood wholly on Bismarck’s side and wished only that he would go to the Reichstag and confound his enemies by making “one of those speeches that in a flash run round the equator.”46 He remained, he wrote, “trotz alledem und alledem,” one of the chancellor’s “most enthusiastic admirers.”47
The differences between Bismarck and the young emperor soon proved to be unbridgeable, and the chancellor went into retirement on 29 March 1890, being followed to the railroad station by what seemed to be all of Berlin. His departure robbed Fontane of one of the keenest pleasures of his old age, reading (or having his wife read to him) the chancellor’s speeches in the Reichstag.48 At a more serious level, it deprived him of the element that gave his world significance, the “great man,” as Jacob Burckhardt had once defined him, the one “without whom the world seems to us to be incomplete, because great achievements were possible within his time and context only through him and are otherwise unthinkable, [for] he is (essentially) interwoven with the (great) mainstream of cause and effect.”49 The loss made it seem necessary to Fontane to find an explanation for Bismarck’s departure that would make it tolerable, and this led him to become ever more persuaded that the explanation was to be found “not in his political mistakes—which are in fact, as long as things are in flux, very difficult to determine—but in his failings of character. This giant had something petty in his nature, and because it was perceived it caused his fall.”50
In the years that followed, Fontane never stopped wrestling with the problem and elaborating on Bismarck’s characterological flaws. In 1891 he explained to his friend Friedla nder that Bismarck’s basic fault was a lack of noble-mindedness, which in the end took the “hateful form of the pettiest spitefulness” and would have destroyed him sooner if it had not been accompanied by his “infernal humor.”51 Later, to the same correspondent, he described Bismarck as a kind of Wallenstein, who made public professions of fealty to the emperor, but privately described the loyalty principle as “Mumpitz.”52 Still later, he saw the old Sachsenwalder in a series of contrasting roles that canceled each other out: “Übermensch and artful dodger,” “state-founder and refuser to pay taxes on his stables,” “hero and cry-baby.”53 The zeal that he showed in discovering ever new illustrations of his theme suggest that he was attempting to establish for himself a position that was more detached than his early enthusiasm for the chancellor. Thus, on Bismarck’s birthday in 1895, he wrote that such flaws “fill me with mixed feelings and do not allow me to experience a pure bright admiration. Something is missing in him, and precisely that quality that lends greatness. The Jew Neumann across from us has not put any flags out, and arm in arm with Neumann I usher my century out the gate.”54 Two years later, almost to the day, he wrote, “I am no Bismarckianer; the last and best in me turns away from him; he does not have a noble nature.”55
That sounds unconditional enough to be convincing, and perhaps it would be, if it were not accompanied in the same letter by a defense of Bismarck against attempts by the emperor and his entourage to diminish the old man’s achievement. Bismarck had played too great a role in Fontane’s life to permit him to suffer detractors lightly, and even the repetition of criticisms that he himself had made was enough to make Fontane rush to his defense. On such occasions, his position was both illogical and clear: “Bismarck is being criticized around and about (by me too); but he remains Bismarck, and that is exactly enough.”56
Heinrich Mann once wrote: “The person who appears and reappears in Fontane’s works and letters and poems is his contemporary Bismarck. He sees him in his greatness and smallness; he knows more about him than anyone since then can know.”57 This is too overstated to be taken seriously. We can judge Fontane’s knowledge of Bismarck only by what he wrote about him, and many aspects of the chancellor’s life and work did not attract his consistent attention. It remains a great pity, for example, that he does not seem to have reflected upon what Bismarck’s long tenure of office would mean for the next generation of Germans. It never occurred to him that they might be the ones to pay for Bismarck’s sins of commission and omission, for his failure to train competent successors in the field of foreign affairs, for example, and for his persistence in maintaining an anachronistic political system in which he had sought—in the case of liberalism with success—to stifle every progressive tendency. Fontane was interested in every facet of Bismarck’s personality but hardly at all in the nature of his political system. Because of that, his attempts to define the nature and limits of the chancellor’s greatness were always unsatisfactory.
Which is not to say, of course, that the relationship between the two men is not fascinating in its own right.