Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)

Prime minister of Prussia (1862-73, 1873-90) and founder and first chancellor (1871-90) of the German Empire. Once the empire was established, he actively and skillfully pursued pacific policies in foreign affairs, succeeding in preserving the peace in Europe for about two decades. But in domestic policies his patrimony was less benign, for he failed to rise above the authoritarian proclivities of the landed squirearchy to which he was born.

Early years

Bismarck was born at Schönhausen, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Ferdinand von Bismarck-Schönhausen, was a Junker squire descended from a Swabian family that had ultimately settled as estate owners in Pomerania. Ferdinand was a typical member of the Prussian landowning elite. The family's economic circumstances were modest—Ferdinand's farming skills being perhaps less than average—and Bismarck was not to know real wealth until the rewards flowed in after the achievement of German unification. His mother, Wilhelmine Mencken, came from an educated bourgeois family that had produced a number of higher civil servants and academics. She had been married to Ferdinand von Bismarck at age 16 and found provincial life confining. When her son Otto was seven, she enrolled him in the progressive Plamann Institute in Berlin and moved to the capital to be near him. The young Bismarck resented exchanging an easy life in the country for a more circumscribed life in a large city, where in school he was pitted against the sons of Berlin's best-educated families. He spent five years at the school and went on to the Frederick William gymnasium for three years. He took his university entrance examination (Abitur) in 1832.

With his mother's encouragement, he took up the study of law at the University of Göttingen in the kingdom of Hanover. Evidently Bismarck was a mediocre student who spent much of his time drinking with his comrades in an aristocratic fraternity. After a brief stint at the university in Berlin, he entered the Prussian civil service, where he was plagued by boredom and an inability to adhere to the hierarchical principles of the bureaucracy. His mother's death in 1839 gave him the opportunity of resigning in order to come to the assistance of his father, who was experiencing financial difficulties in the management of his estate. From 1839 to 1847 Bismarck lived the ordinary life of a Prussian country squire. Subsequently he romanticized these years on the land and wondered why he had abandoned an idyllic existence for the insecurities of a life in politics. This frequently expressed nostalgia may have been more guise than reality.

During this period he met and married Johanna von Puttkamer, the daughter of a conservative aristocratic family famed for its devout pietism. While courting Johanna, Bismarck experienced a religious conversion that was to give him inner strength and security. A subsequent critic was to remark that Bismarck believed in a God who invariably agreed with him on all issues. There is no question that the marriage was a very happy one. In fact, Bismarck's last words before dying in 1898 expressed the wish that he would once again see Johanna, who had passed away some years earlier.

His politics during the 1840s did not diverge substantially from those of a typical country squire. If anything, his politics were more conservative. He believed in a Christian state that received its sanction ultimately from the deity. The existing social and political order was to be defended in order to prevent a Hobbesian chaos of all against all. Given his views, Bismarck was welcomed as a member of the religious conservative circle around the brothers von Gerlach, who were stout defenders of the noble estate against the encroachments of bureaucratic centralization. Bismarck had nothing but sarcasm for aristocratic liberals who viewed England as a model for Prussia. In 1847 he attended the Prussian United Diet, where his speeches against Jewish emancipation and contemporary liberalism gained him the reputation of a backwoods conservative, out of touch with the dynamic forces of his age.

Bismarck's response to the liberal revolution that swept through Europe in 1848 confirmed his image as a reactionary. He opposed any concessions to the liberals and expressed contempt for the king's willingness to bargain with the revolutionaries. He even considered marching his peasants to Berlin to free Frederick William IV from the baneful influence of the rebels. With other archconservatives, including Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, he began contributing to the Kreuzzeitung newspaper (1848) as an organ of antirevolutionary sentiment.

For Bismarck's future role, it is important to understand his analysis of the revolution. He identified the forces of change as confined solely to the educated and propertied middle class. The vast majority of Prussians, however, were peasants and artisans, who, in Bismarck's view, were loyal monarchists. The task of the forces of order was to confirm the loyalty of these two groups by means of material concessions. The economic policies of the urban middle-class radicals were rooted in pure self-interest, he maintained. The radicals would spur industrial growth at the expense of the lower middle class and the farm population. Ultimately, even the middle class itself might be won over by tactical concessions and success in foreign policy. This strategic and opportunist thinking distanced Bismarck from the ideological conservatives, who were wedded to traditional concepts of authority. His vision of a manipulative state that sustained its power by rewarding obedient groups remained with him throughout his political career.

Early career

In 1849 he was elected to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies (the lower chamber of the Prussian Diet) and moved his family to Berlin. At this stage he was far from a German nationalist. He told one of his fellow conservatives, "We are Prussians, and Prussians we shall remain . . .. We do not wish to see the Kingdom of Prussia obliterated in the putrid brew of cosy south German sentimentality." In 1851 Frederick William IV appointed Bismarck as the Prussian representative to the federal Diet in Frankfurt, a clear reward for his loyalty to the monarchy.

With the defeat of the revolution in central Europe, Austria had reasserted its supremacy in the German Confederation, and Bismarck, being an archconservative, was assumed to support the status quo, which included Austrian hegemony. He lived in Frankfurt for eight years, where he experienced a commercial and cultural environment quite different from that of a Prussian estate.

It was in Frankfurt that Bismarck began to reassess his view of German nationalism and the goals of Prussian foreign policy. Not only did he find the constant deference to the Austrians in Frankfurt demeaning, but he also realized that the status quo meant acceptance of Prussia as a second-rate power in central Europe. In 1854 he opposed close cooperation with Austria, arguing that it entailed "binding our spruce and seaworthy frigate to the wormy old warship of Austria." Gradually he began to consider the options that would make Prussia the undisputed power in Germany. A vision of a Prussian-dominated northern Europe and a redirection of Austrian power to the Slavic areas in the south took shape in his mind. If necessary, a war with Austria to destroy its hegemony was not to be excluded. Implementation of such a policy would be anything but conservative because it would entail radical changes in the map of Europe as it had been drawn by the conservative powers at Vienna, Austria, in 1815.

Prime minister

In 1859 Bismarck was sent to Russia as Prussian ambassador, and not long thereafter (May 1862) he moved to Paris as ambassador to the court of Napoleon III. Thus he had 11 years of experience in foreign affairs before he became prime minister and foreign minster of Prussia in September 1862. He had come to know personally the architects of French, Russian, and Austrian foreign policy. Ironically, Bismarck was called back by Emperor William I (1861-88) to the reigns of power at a critical juncture in Prussia's internal development.

For more than two years William had been locked in a battle with the Chamber of Deputies over military reform. Having been in the army much of his adult life, the monarch (similar to earlier Prussian kings) considered it entirely within his prerogative to increase the size of the military and the years of service. When the liberal majority did not approve the revenue for these reforms, William refused to negotiate or compromise with liberal politicians over the fundamental issue of sovereignty. He prorogued Parliament twice, and each time the liberal majority increased.

The appointment of Bismarck was the monarch's last desperate effort to avoid parliamentary sovereignty over the military. The Chamber of Deputies interpreted it as an act of defiance—a throwing down of the gauntlet. But the Bismarck who returned to Berlin from Paris was not the backwoods conservative of 1848. Having lived in Frankfurt and Paris, he had come to appreciate the growing importance of the propertied and educated middle class. And in France he had experienced the Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III, which relied on the combination of success in foreign policy and plebiscites at home to shore up the emperor's authoritarian regime. Bismarck had changed to such a degree that he actually returned with the idea of seeking a compromise over the military issue. But William I rejected a sensible proposal offered by Bismarck, leaving him no alternative but a policy of confrontation. Bismarck then announced that there was a "gap" in the constitution. If the king and the members of the Upper Chamber and the Chamber of Deputies, who together were responsible for the budget, failed to come to an agreement, the government in the interim had to proceed without it. Taxes were to be collected (and spent) on the basis of the old budget because civil servants had to be paid and the government had to continue functioning. This tactic, applied from 1863 to 1866, allowed him to implement the military reforms without the sanction of Parliament. Bismarck did, indeed, appear to be the reactionary, confrontational aristocrat out of tune with his time.

But there were hints that this was more appearance than reality. Bismarck said that "Prussia must collect and keep its strength for the right moment, which has been missed several times already; Prussia's frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron." He was giving the opposition evidence that he intended to use Prussia's military might not for internal suppression but for the liberal goal of achieving national unification. The liberal opposition, however, chose to ignore these hints, and on May 22, 1863, by a vote of 239 to 61, they informed William I that they would not deal with his prime minister any further. After eight months in office, Bismarck had failed to achieve any agreement with the parliamentary opposition.

Bismarck now turned to foreign policy in the hope that success on this front would weaken the electorate's clear desire for political reform. Trouble had been brewing since 1848 between the Danes and the German population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. (Both duchies were in union with Denmark; Schleswig, however, had a large German population, and Holstein was a member of the German Confederation.) When the Danish king acted rashly, Bismarck made sure that it was Prussia and Austria rather than the German Confederation which represented German interests. Liberal leaders like Rudolf Virchow still saw Bismarck as an unrepentant reactionary who was "no longer the man who joined us with feeling that he was going to accomplish something with an energetic foreign policy."

A quick successful war against Denmark left the fate of Schleswig and Holstein up to Bismarck and the Austrians. After much haggling, the Convention of Gastein was signed on August 20, 1865; it provided for Schleswig to be administered by Prussia and Holstein by Austria. Liberals remained unappeased by Prussian military prowess and once again defeated the army bill in January 1865.

In 1866 Bismarck nonetheless continued his efforts to divert liberal interest from the budget conflict and toward the success of Prussian arms. He repeatedly told the Austrians that their future lay in the south and that they would be wise to yield dominance in Germany. But in both cases his words fell on deaf ears. Bismarck had clearly decided to play the German national card in order to achieve a Prussian-dominated Germany. After making sure that Russia would not intervene and after gaining an alliance with Italy, he set about fostering conflict with the Austrians. He stirred up Hungarian nationalism against Austria—a policy that showed how radical means could be used in the service of his own conservative ends. On June 9, 1866, Prussian troops invaded Holstein, and a few days later Austria, supported by the smaller states of Saxony, Hesse-Kassel, and Hanover, went to war. Within six weeks Prussia had inflicted a major defeat on the Austrians at Königgrätz (Sadowa). Bismarck then counseled moderation so that Austria would not be humiliated. Against a king and generals who wanted to march to Vienna, he urged a quick cessation of hostilities, recognizing that other powers might intervene if the war continued. Europe was stunned: in a few weeks Prussia had transformed the distribution of power in central Europe. Austria, the major power in Germany for centuries, was now relegated to secondary status.

Bismarck now showed both ruthlessness and moderation. The Peace of Nikolsburg scarcely demanded anything from Austria. But Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Frankfurt, all of which had fought against Prussia, were annexed, to the shock of conservatives. The king of Hanover was removed from power, as was the ruling house in Hesse. While conservatives were appalled at the German civil war between the two powers who had been opposed to revolution, the liberal middle class flocked to support Bismarck. Their goal of German unification seemed close at hand. Bismarck, moreover, now apologized for his high-handedness over the issue of the military budget and offered an olive branch of peace to the liberals. The party divided over Bismarck's offer. He had achieved one of his major goals—gaining a large part of the middle class to see the Prussian monarchy as their ally.

The North German Confederation was established in 1867 with Prussia as its matrix. Its constitution, on the surface, appeared progressive. To begin with, it established universal manhood suffrage with a secret ballot. But this was a result of Bismarck's belief that the vast majority of Prussians, if enfranchised, would vote conservative. From this perspective, a restricted ballot aided the liberals. (Of course, in 1867 neither the socialists nor the Catholic Centre had established political parties.) Moreover, whereas in theory the lower house (Reichstag) seemed an important reservoir of power given its ability to reject any bill, in practice its powers were circumscribed in the areas of military and foreign policy. Ministers were chosen by and responsible to the emperor and not the legislature. Nevertheless, the constitution provided a basis for evolution in a democratic direction.

Although Bismarck voiced doubts whether unification would occur in his lifetime, he actually set about tying the southern states to the north almost immediately. An all-German customs parliament was proposed, joint military training was negotiated, and a plan was advanced which entailed that the southern states recognize William as German emperor. All these efforts failed because of popular opposition in the south. Bismarck then sought to propel history a bit faster by seeking conflict with France. If he could not bring the south into a united German nation by reason, he would rely on the passions aroused by war. Ever the master tactician, he worked behind the scenes to be certain that neither Russia nor Austria would intervene in such a war. Nor did he have to work hard to produce a conflict, because the French emperor, Napoleon III, was indignant at the sudden emergence of Prussia, especially since he did not receive the compensation he sought—the annexation of Luxembourg.

When in 1869 the Spanish throne was offered to the king's cousin, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Napoleon III perceived this as an effort to encircle France. He twice sent his ambassador, Vincent Benedetti, to the Prussian king at Bad Ems, once to demand that acceptance of the offer be withdrawn (which it was on July 12) and a second time to demand that under no circumstances should a member of the Hohenzollern family accept the Spanish throne in the future. The king politely refused the second request. Bismarck received a telegram from Bad Ems (the Ems telegram) giving a detailed account of the interview between William I and the French ambassador, which he proceeded to edit and abridge for the press in such a way that the French appeared to seek a humiliation of the Prussian monarch, and the monarch's rejection of Napoleon's demands seemed insultingly brusque to the French. The French responded by declaring war on Prussia on July 19, 1870. When the French were decisively defeated at Sedan in September, it appeared as though Bismarck would be able to score a third rapid victory in seven years. But guerrilla warfare broke out, and Paris held out despite the capture of the emperor. Bismarck, however, stirred anti-French passions to such a fever pitch that in January 1871 the four southern states joined the North German Confederation to create the German Empire. The lesser German solution, with seven million German-speaking Austrians excluded, was the result of Bismarck's three wars. He was showered with honours and hailed as a national hero.

Imperial chancellor

It is important to note that the Germany Bismarck created was not the result of strong popular currents of nationalist sentiment but of cabinet diplomacy and war. Not all German-speaking areas of Europe were included but only as many as Prussia could unite while retaining hegemony. The new constitution was a revision of the Prussian constitution from 1867; it included the position of chancellor, designed with Bismarck specifically in mind. Bismarck also remained prime minister of Prussia until 1890, apart from a brief period in 1872-73.

The peace treaty with France was harsh. Alsace and part of Lorraine, two French provinces with sizable German-speaking populations, were annexed. Also, a five-billion-franc indemnity was exacted. While Austria and Denmark quickly forgot their defeats, France did not. Regardless of whether Bismarck annexed the provinces in response to German public opinion or for other reasons, French hostility was to haunt the German Empire until the provinces were returned to France in 1918.

Foreign policy

Until his resignation in 1890, Bismarck had a relatively free hand in the conduct of foreign policy. After three successful wars, he saw his task as promoting peace and gaining time so that the powerful German Empire would come to be accepted as natural. Bismarck's two areas of concern were the Balkans, where the disintegration of the Turkish empire could easily lead to conflict between the Habsburg monarchy and Russia, and France, where the desire to avenge the defeat at Sedan was strong. In each area a general European conflagration could flare up and involve Germany. In 1873 he embraced a pacific foreign policy when he negotiated the Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors' League) with Russia and Austria-Hungary. But the alliance did not survive the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. When the Austrians and British threatened war over a Carthaginian peace imposed on Turkey by the Russian victors, Bismarck called for a peace congress in Berlin. The German chancellor succeeded in getting the Russians to moderate their gains, and peace was preserved.

But a European conflagration had barely been averted. Soon after the conference, Bismarck negotiated a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary, which remained in effect through World War I. Although in the mid-1860s he had rejected such an alliance as harmful, he now considered it advantageous. Because he feared that the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy would lead to Russian expansion into central Europe, he sought the alliance to gain leverage in Vienna. He steadfastly used it to prevent a war in the Balkans. In addition, he did not want seven million Austro-German Catholics seeking admission to the empire.

Having a solid ally, Bismarck demonstrated his virtuosity by negotiating a revived Dreikaiserbund in 1881. He now had influence in St. Petersburg as well as in Vienna to prevent a Balkan war. In 1882 Italy, fearing French hostility, joined the Dual Alliance, making it into the Triple Alliance. On the surface Bismarck had triumphed. France had no allies for a war of revenge, and, for the moment, a Balkan war seemed unlikely.

But the ephemeral nature of all these alliances soon became apparent. A crisis in Bulgaria inflamed Russo-Austrian relations, leading to a breakup of the revived league. Once again a war was avoided with Bismarck's intervention, but his efforts could not reconstitute the league. He then negotiated a separate secret treaty with Russia, while maintaining the 1879 accord with Austria-Hungary.

Between 1870 and 1890 Bismarck earned the respect of European leaders for his earnest efforts in behalf of peace. Apart from a few colonial acquisitions in the mid-1880s, Germany had acted as a satiate power. All of Bismarck's considerable tactical skills had been successful in creating a powerful German Empire in his first decade in power. For the next two decades these same skills maintained the peace.

Domestic policy

From the defeat of Austria in 1866 until 1878 Bismarck was allied primarily with the National Liberals. Together they created a civil and criminal code for the new empire and accomplished Germany's adoption of the gold standard and move toward free trade. Just as they had earlier written off Bismarck as an archconservative, liberals now viewed him as a comrade—a man who had rejected his conservative roots. Many conservative leaders agreed with this assessment. Bismarck had cashiered kings, gone to war against conservative regimes, and adopted policies that promoted rapid industrialization. Their fears were further enhanced when he joined liberals in a campaign against political Catholicism (Kulturkampf) in 1873.

Bismarck had not counted on the emergence of new parties such as the Catholic Centre or the Social Democratic Party, both of whom began participating in imperial and Prussian elections in the early 1870s. Along with the left liberal Progressive Party, he labeled them all enemies of the empire (Reichsfeinde). Each in its own way rejected his vision of a united Germany. The Progressives found the empire too conservative and its elite essentially feudal; the socialists questioned its capitalist character; and for the Centre the empire was Protestant and too centralized.

Bismarck's aim was clearly to destroy the Catholic Centre Party. He and the liberals feared the appeal of a clerical party to the one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. In Prussia the minister of public worship and education, Adalbert Falk, with Bismarck's blessing, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. Clerical civil servants were purged from the Prussian administration. Hundreds of parishes and several bishoprics were left without incumbents.

The Kulturkampf failed to achieve its goals and, if anything, convinced the Catholic minority that their fear of persecution was real. Bismarck gradually relented in his campaign, especially after the death of the activist pope, Pius IX, in 1878. But he never relented in his hatred for the Centre leader, Ludwig Windthorst, a Hanoverian who had earlier experienced Bismarck's methods in the annexation of his kingdom. Bismarck's speeches continued to be barbed with anticlericalism until his fall in 1890.

In 1878-79 Bismarck initiated a significant change in economic policy, which coincided with his new alliance with the conservative parties at the expense of the liberals. Tariffs were introduced on iron as well as on major grains. The new policy was a result of the "great depression" that had swept Europe and the United States in the mid-1870s. Bismarck's shift had serious political implications: it signified his opposition to any further evolution in the direction of political democracy. The liberal ministers Falk and Rudolph von Delbrück resigned, and Robert von Puttkamer became minister of public worship and education in 1879 and minister of interior in 1881. The grain tariffs provided the Junker estate owners of Prussia, who constituted the main opposition to political reform, subventions that isolated them somewhat from the world market. From 1879 onward, the landed elite, major industrialists, the military, and higher civil servants formed an alliance to forestall the rise of social democracy.

Ever since the Commune of Paris of 1871, Bismarck had developed an uncompromising hatred for socialists and anarchists. His attacks on them were egregious. At one point he wrote, "They are this country's rats and should be exterminated." Another time he called them "a host of enemies bent on pillage and murder." He thus introduced a crude and unsavory discourse into everyday German politics that was to be long-lived. Although only two socialists sat in the Reichstag in 1871, their number and support grew with each election, until they had 35 seats in 1890. As early as 1876 Bismarck had sought legislation to outlaw the party but failed to get a majority. After two assassination attempts against William I he prorogued Parliament and ran a campaign in which the socialists (quite unjustly) were blamed for the failed efforts to kill the emperor. The conservative parties triumphed and the Social Democratic Party was banned in 1878. The ban was renewed until 1890.

The second part of Bismarck's strategy to destroy social democracy was the introduction of social legislation to woo the workers away from political radicalism. During the 1880s, accident and old-age insurance as well as a form of socialized medicine were introduced and implemented by the government. But Bismarck's two-pronged strategy to win the workers for the conservative regime did not succeed. Support for the Social Democrats increased with each election.

The election of 1890 was a disaster for Bismarck. The Centre, the Social Democrats, and the Progressives, the parties that he had termed enemies of the empire, gained more than half of the seats in the new Reichstag. The new young emperor William (Wilhelm) II, who was emperor and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, did not want to begin his reign with a bloodbath or a coup d'é:tat by the state. Seventy-five years old in 1890, Bismarck resigned with a sense of having failed. The antisocialist law was not revived, and the new government set out to win the workers to the regime. Bismarck retired to his estate an embittered man. That he was now a prince and extremely wealthy did not ease his retirement. For the next eight years until his death in 1898 he issued sharp critiques of his successors. Elected to the Reichstag, he chose not to take his seat. He wrote his memoirs, which became best-sellers. To some extent he orchestrated the Bismarck legend that was to dominate German historical writing for the next half century.

Assessment

Bismarck was a towering figure who put his stamp on his age, as Luther and Metternich had done earlier. When Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia in 1862, the kingdom was universally considered the weakest of the five European powers. Less than nine years later Prussia had been victorious in three wars, and a unified German Empire had emerged in the heart of Europe, arousing envy and fear among its rivals. When Bismarck left office in 1890, after 28 years as prime minister of Prussia and 19 as chancellor of the German Empire, the map of Europe had been changed beyond measure. The European centre, characterized by a weak conglomeration of small and medium-sized states for centuries, was now home to the foremost military and industrial power on the Continent.

Bismarck's legacy to the next generation, however, was a mixed one. In foreign affairs his skill had led to 20 years of peace in Europe, which had gained him a deserved reputation for moderation and a sense of limits. Bismarck's greatest achievement, the German Empire, only survived him by 20 years. Although he had united Germany in one sense, he had failed to create an internally unified people. In domestic affairs—as in foreign policy—he sought to freeze the status quo after 1871. His empire was designed to be conservative. Thus he opposed the Catholic Centre in the 1870s and the socialists in the 1880s because both constituted unforeseen threats to his authoritarian creation. He also introduced a vicious rhetoric into German politics that forestalled a sense of common destiny. While German industry developed rapidly during his decades in power, he would allow no evolution in the political system toward greater participation. In this sense, Bismarck was a last representative of the world of the ancien ré:gime and cabinet diplomacy. (Encyclopaedia Britannica Article)

Kenneth Barkin