Bismarck Read online

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78742-2

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, September, 1967

  © Copyright, 1955, by A. J. P. Taylor

  All rights reserved under International

  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published

  in New York by Random House, Inc.

  Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  VINTAGE BOOKS are published by

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  I. THE BOY AND THE MAN

  II. THE DIPLOMAT

  III. PRIME MINISTER OF PRUSSIA

  IV. THE DEFEAT OF AUSTRIA

  V. THE NORTH GERMAN CONFEDERATION

  VI. THE GERMAN EMPIRE IN THE DAYS OF LIBERALISM

  VII. THE CHANCE OF COURSE

  VIII. THE CONSERVATIVE CHANCELLOR

  IX. THE FALL FROM POWER

  X. INTO THE GRAVE—AND BEYOND IT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  Map by Robert Galvin, from A HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD, by R. R. Palmer

  I

  THE BOY AND THE MAN

  OTTO VON BISMARCK was born at Schönhausen in the Old Mark of Brandenburg on 1 April 1815. Both place and date hinted at the pattern of his life. Schönhausen lay just east of the Elbe, in appearance a typical Junker estate—some sheep and cattle, wheat and beetroot fields, with woods in the background. Life seemed to follow a traditional rhythm, far removed from the modern world. Yet if Bismarck had been born two years earlier, the kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Jerome Bonaparte, would have been just across the river. French troops had occupied Schönhausen during the wars; French revolutionary ideas lapped to the edge of its fields. The true Junkers lived far away to the east, in Pomerania and Silesia. These Junkers were a Prussian speciality—gentry proud of their birth, but working their estates themselves and often needing public employment to supplement their incomes. They looked with jealousy at the high aristocracy with its cosmopolitan culture and its monopoly of the greatest offices in the state. We may find a parallel in the English country-gentry with their Tory prejudices and their endless feud against the Whig magnates; but the Junkers were nearer to the soil, often milking their own cows and selling their wool themselves at the nearest market, sometimes distinguished from the more prosperous peasant-farmers only by their historic names.

  Schönhausen was an estate of this kind, but the winds of the modern world blew round it. Though Bismarck was born a couple of miles on the Junker side of the Elbe, he was always the Junker who looked across it—sometimes with apprehension, sometimes with sympathy. The date of his birth was also significant. A fortnight earlier Napoleon had arrived in Paris for his last adventure of the Hundred Days. The old order had a narrow escape. Bismarck, despite his appearance of titanic calm, was always aware of the revolutionary tide that had threatened to engulf the antiquated life of Schönhausen. The kingdom of Prussia, of which he was a subject, had risen again into the ranks of the Great Powers, but it had been almost snuffed out by Napoleon. Her statesmen feared that the same fate might come again. It became their dogma: ‘Unless we grow greater we shall become less’. This was no basis for a confident conservatism.

  The very geography of Schönhausen also shaped Bismarck’s character and political outlook. It was unmistakably in north Germany, in a district entirely inhabited by Protestants. Bismarck never came to regard the south Germans as true Germans, particularly if they were Roman Catholics. Yet Schönhausen also lay far from the sea. Its inhabitants looked to Berlin as their metropolis; and the connexion which Bismarck later established with Hamburg was always rather artificial. If Germany was to expand at all, he preferred that it should be overseas rather than down the Danube; yet both were alien to him. The eastern expansion of Prussia, which had shaped her history, was equally remote for him. Unlike the Junkers of Silesia or West Prussia, he never had a Pole among his peasants. The Poles whom he denounced from personal experience were educated revolutionaries, not workers on the land; it was because of them that Bismarck disliked intellectuals in politics.

  There was a similar contradiction in his family heritage. His father Ferdinand was a typical Junker, sprung from a family as old as the Hohenzollerns—‘a Suabian family no better than mine’ Bismarck once remarked. Schönhausen itself symbolized their humiliation; for they had received it as compensation for their original family estate, which a Hohenzollern elector had coveted and seized. The Bismarcks had done nothing to gain distinction during their long feudal obscurity. Ferdinand did not even exert himself to fight for his king. He left the Prussian army at 23; and missed both the disastrous Jena campaign in 1806 and the war of liberation against Napoleon in 1813. The efficient management of his rambling estates was beyond him, and he drifted helplessly into economic difficulties. It needed a vivid imagination for the son to turn this easy-going, slow-witted man, with his enormous frame, into a hero, representing all that was best in Prussian tradition.

  Wilhelmine, the mother, was a different character. Her family, the Menkens, were bureaucrats without a title, not aristocrat landowners. Some of them had been university professors. Her father was a servant of the Prussian state, prized by Frederick the Great and later in virtual control of all home affairs. His reforms and quick critical spirit brought down on him the accusation of ‘Jacobinism’. Wilhelmine was a town-child, at home only in the drawing rooms of Berlin. She had a sharp, restless intellect, which roamed without system from Swedenborg to Mesmer. At one moment she would be discussing the latest works of political liberalism; at the next dabbling in spiritualist experiments. Married to Ferdinand von Bismarck at sixteen, she developed interest neither for her heavy husband nor in country life. All her hopes were centred on her children. They were to achieve the intellectual life that had been denied to her. Her only ambition, she said, was to have ‘a grown-up son who would penetrate far further into the world of ideas than I, as a woman, have been able to do.’

  She gave her children encouragement without love. She drove them on; she never showed them affection. Otto, the younger son, inherited her brains. He was not grateful for the legacy. He wanted love from her, not ideas; and he was resentful that she did not share his admiration for his father. It is a psychological commonplace for a son to feel affection for his mother and to wish his father out of the way. The results are more interesting and more profound when a son, who takes after his mother, dislikes her character and standards of value. He will seek to turn himself into the father with whom he has little in common, and he may well end up neurotic or a genius. Bismarck was both. He was the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthy father.

  Even his appearance showed it. He was a big man, made bigger by his persistence in eating and drinking too much. He walked stiffly, with the upright carriage of a hereditary officer. Yet he had a small, fine head; the delicate hands of an artist; and when he spoke, his voice, which one would have expected to be deep and powerful, was thin and reedy—almost a falsetto—the voice of an academic, not of a man of action. Nor did he always present the same face to the world. He lives in history clean-shaven, except for a heavy moustache. Actually he wore a full beard for long periods of his life; and this at a time when beards were symbols on the continent of Europe of the Romantic movement, if not of radicalism. In the use of a razor, as in other things, Bismarck sometimes followed Metternich, sometimes Marx. Despite his Junker mien, he had the sensitivity of a woman, incredibly quick in responding to the moods of another, or even in anticipating them. His conversational charm could bewitch tsars, queens and revolutionary leaders. Yet his great strokes o
f policy came after long solitary brooding, not after discussion with others. Indeed he never exchanged ideas in the usual sense of the term. He gave orders or, more rarely, carried them out; he did not co-operate. In a life of conflict, he fought himself most of all. He said once: ‘Faust complains of having two souls in his breast. I have a whole squabbling crowd. It goes on as in a republic.’ When someone asked him if he were really the Iron Chancellor, he replied: ‘Far from it. I am all nerves, so much so that self-control has always been the greatest task of my life and still is.’ He willed himself into a line of policy or action. His friend Keyserling noted of his conversion to religion: ‘Doubt was not fought and conquered; it was silenced by heroic will.’

  He felt himself always out of place, solitary and a stranger to his surroundings. ‘I have the unfortunate nature that everywhere I could be seems desirable to me, and dreary and boring as soon as I am there.’ He loathed the intellectual circles of Berlin to which his mother introduced him, and in 1848 said to a liberal politician: ‘I am a Junker and mean to have the advantages of that position.’ But the years he spent as a Junker, managing his estates, were the most miserable of his life; and when, as Chancellor, he retired to his beloved countryside, he was happy only so long as the state papers continued to pour in on him. He spent the twenty-eight years of supreme power announcing his wish to relinquish it; yet no man has left office with such ill grace or fought so unscrupulously to recover it. He despised writers and literary men; yet only Luther and Goethe rank with him as masters of German prose. He found happiness only in his family; loved his wife, and gave to his children the affection that he had been denied by his mother. He said in old age that his greatest good fortune was ‘that God did not take any of my children from me.’ Yet he ruined the happiness of his adored elder son for the sake of a private feud, and thought nothing of spending a long holiday away from his wife in the company of a pretty girl; indeed he was so self-centred that he boasted to his wife of the girl’s charm and good looks. He claimed to serve sometimes the king of Prussia, sometimes Germany, sometimes God. All three were cloaks for his own will; and he turned against them ruthlessly when they did not serve his purpose. He could have said with Oliver Cromwell, whom he much resembled; ‘He goeth furthest who knows not whither he is going.’ The young Junker had no vision that he would unify Germany on the basis of universal suffrage; and the maker of three wars did not expect to end as the great buttress of European peace.

  Bismarck was not brought up as a Junker, despite his constant assertions of this character in later life. The family moved soon after he was born to the smaller estate of Kniephof in Pomerania. Here there was a smaller house with no architectural pretensions and hard practical farming. The Junkers, unlike the English gentry, did not live on rents. They worked the land themselves, and their peasants were, in reality, agricultural labourers, many of whom did not cultivate any land of their own. Bismarck experienced this idyllic existence only till he was seven. Then his mother set up house in Berlin, no doubt much to her own satisfaction, but ostensibly to send her sons to school in the capital. This exile from the country gave Bismarck a lasting grievance against his mother. The education which she chose for him was another. A Junker’s son usually went into a cadet corps and, later, joined a cavalry regiment, even if he was not destined for a permanent military career. Wilhelmine, however, insisted that her children should have an intellectual education suited to the grandsons of the great Menken; and Bismarck went to the best Berlin grammar school of the day where he mixed with the sons of middle-class families. His mother revived her connexions with the court; and Bismarck led a privileged existence, mixing on intimate terms with the younger Hohenzollerns. This counted in his later career. Despite his sturdy affectation of independence, he was always inside the royal circle and was treated as one of the family.

  The spirit of the Enlightenment still dominated Prussian education; and Bismarck left school ‘as a Pantheist and if not as a republican, with the belief that a republic was the most reasonable form of state.’ His mother once more imposed her intellectual standards by sending him out of Prussia to the university of Göttingen in Hanover, the greatest liberal centre of the day. Bismarck at first took a radical line. He defied university discipline both in behaviour and ideas. What was more, he joined the Burschenschaften—students’ unions which tried to keep alive the revolutionary spirit of the war of liberation. He soon turned the other way. It was one thing to pose as a young radical in the court circles of Berlin; quite another to accept these ill-bred students from the middle class as his equals. Personal relations changed Bismarck’s political outlook, as was often to happen in his later life. He suddenly discovered pride of blood and joined an aristocratic students-corps. He still led a disorderly existence. He drank a great deal; had some passionate affaires; and, like the young Disraeli, wore fantastic and colourful clothes. He was always ready for a duel, though the only time he was injured he characteristically alleged that it was a foul blow—an allegation which he maintained unforgivingly even thirty years later. After three terms, debts drove him back to Berlin, where he could live at home; and here he put in a second academic year. In May, 1835, when he was just twenty, he scraped through the examination which qualified him for entry into the Prussian civil service.

  Though Bismarck was never a great scholar, his years at the university left their mark. He read widely, despite his boasts of idleness, though he read more history than the law that he was supposed to be studying. He liked Schiller, admired Goethe, and ranked Shakespeare and Byron above either of them—tastes characteristic of the Romantic movement. Scott was his greatest favourite of all, romance and history blended in the right proportions. Bismarck’s classical learning was scanty; his scientific knowledge almost non-existent. All the historical references in his speeches are to the three hundred years since the Reformation; his occasional echoes of Darwinianism only what he could pick up from a newspaper. Philosophy never interested him; and he was one of the few Germans to escape the influence of Hegel. People were always more important to Bismarck than books; and he made at the university the only two lasting friendships of his life, both with men who were—like him—in a strange environment, fish out of water. Alexander Keyserling was a German baron from the Baltic and later a distinguished naturalist. John Motley was a budding American diplomat, who became the historian of the Dutch republic. Bismarck trusted himself only to these strangers. The ties of affection between these three never weakened, despite years of separation. Bismarck was writing to ‘dear old John’ with undiminished enthusiasm forty years later; and even when he became Imperial Chancellor would throw aside the cares and dignity of office to make Motley welcome. Keyserling was less demonstrative; but he, too, was faithful. After Bismarck’s fall from power, Keyserling, though nearly eighty, left his Baltic retreat to console his old friend; and his visit gave Bismarck a last experience of quiet happiness.

  Bismarck grew up into the Germany of reaction. The great storm of the Napoleonic empire had been followed by ‘the quiet years’. Germany was divided into thirty-nine states, the survivors after much Napoleonic reconstruction. Most of them were tiny; half a dozen were of medium rank; and, overshadowing them, the two great states, Austria and Prussia. The congress of Vienna had tied them all together into a loose confederation, which was supposed to settle internal disputes and even to provide a federal defence force in case of foreign war. In practice its only function turned out to be the suppression of German liberalism; and it did even that ineffectively. Austria was the presiding Power in the confederation. She had the greater historic prestige—an emperor as ruler, and Metternich, the most famous statesman of the day, as chancellor. She had the army of a Great Power, supposedly capable of challenging that of France, as it had often done—unsuccessfully—during the Napoleonic wars. But the Austrian empire was in decay—its finances shaky, its administration rigid and out-of-date, its very existence menaced by the rise of Italian and German nationalism.

/>   Prussia had been the more severely mauled by Napoleon; and remembrance of this kept her policy safely on the conservative line with Austria. She hardly counted among the Great Powers. In 1815, there were only ten million Prussians, as against thirty million Frenchmen and almost thirty million subjects of the Austrian emperor. Her army was not of much esteem. The other Powers relied on conscripts chosen by lot, who served for fifteen or twenty years. Prussia made up for her weakness in manpower by giving all, or most, of her subjects a three-year training and recalling them for service in time of war. Though this was to be the pattern of all subsequent military development, it was despised by contemporary experts as providing little more than a civilian militia. Frederick William III, who reigned until 1840, was timid and unimaginative, clinging anxiously to Metternich’s coat-tails for protection. During the excitement of the war of liberation he promised his people a constitution. But he soon repented of his promise and did not carry it out. All that remained of it was a promise that the Prussian state would not incur any new loan without the consent of some sort of popular assembly. The eight provinces of Prussia had diets elected on a class basis and with few real functions. For all practical purposes Prussia continued to be run by a narrow bureaucracy, its standards of efficiency and honesty higher than any other in Europe, but remote from popular feeling.

  Germany was still overwhelmingly rural, even Berlin only an overgrown garrison-town. The French had begun to develop the coalmines of the Ruhr when they controlled the Kingdom of Westphalia. But the few great capitalists of Germany drew their wealth from commerce and banking on the artery of the Rhine. The customs-union (Zollverein) which Prussia had organized by 1834 got rid of most internal tariffs, but trade was on a modest scale—mainly the import of British manufactured goods in exchange for German wool and wheat. There was some intellectual stir in Germany, despite this economic stagnation. The German universities were at this time the best in Europe. The Prince Consort rightly took them as his model when he attempted, somewhat ineffectually, to reform Oxford and Cambridge. Most of the students affected a hazy radicalism. Even Bismarck did not escape this influence. He jeered at the bureaucracy and said to Keyserling: ‘A constitution is inevitable. This is the way to honour in the world.’ Like most of his generation, he thought that Prussia would come to dominate Germany by her liberalism, not by her strength.