Otto von Bismarck

Chancellor of the German Empire (1871–1890)

• Born: April 1, 1815
• Birthplace: Schönhausen, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: July 30, 1898
• Place of death: Friedrichsruh, Germany

Known as the “blood and iron chancellor,” Bismarck occasioned the unification of the several German states into the German Empire of 1871-1918. Though his image is that of an aristocrat in a spiked helmet, he was above all a diplomat and a politician, skillfully manipulating the forces at work within Germany and among the European states to achieve his goals.

Early Life

Young Otto von Bismarck was influenced both by his father’s and his mother’s heritages. His father was a Prussian Junker, an aristocrat of proud lineage but modest financial means. The family estates were not particularly large or productive, but provided a setting of paternalistic rule over peasants long accustomed to serve. From his mother and her family, Bismarck learned the sophistication of the upper bourgeoisie, the cosmopolitanism of city life and foreign languages, and something of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Both sides of the family took pride in service to the Prussian state and its ruling dynasty, the Hohenzollern. The Junker aristocrats often served in the military, while the upper bourgeoisie chose the civil service.

Bismarck received a rigorous classical education and attended Göttingen and Berlin universities. He tried his hand at a career in the Prussian diplomatic and civil service. Though his excellent family connections and quick mind should have assured his success, his early career was a disaster. He was temperamentally unsuited to the discipline of a subordinate position, and he alienated his supervisors time after time. “I want to play the tune the way it sounds good to me,” he commented, “or not at all. . . . My pride bids me command rather than obey.” Like all young men of his class, Bismarck served a few months in the army and remained a reserve officer throughout his life, but he never considered a military career. At the age of twenty-four, he resigned from the Prussian bureaucracy and took charge of one of the family’s estates. Then his life changed under the influence of pietist Lutheran families; he married Johanna von Puttkamer, a woman from one such family, in 1847, and settled down to the domesticity of country life.

The revolutions of 1848 roused him from the country and brought Bismarck into politics. He quickly made a name for himself as a champion of the Hohenzollern monarchy against the liberal and democratic revolutionaries, and, after the failure of the revolution, the grateful King Frederick William IV appointed him to a choice position in the diplomatic corps. He represented Prussia at the German Diet at Frankfurt am Main and then at the courts of Czar Alexander II of Russia and Emperor Napoleon III of France, making a name for himself as a shrewd negotiator and a vigorous advocate of Prussian interests.

Life’s Work

Bismarck was recalled to Berlin by King William I of Prussia in 1862 to solve a political and constitutional crisis. The Prussian Diet was refusing to pass the royal budget, because it disagreed with military reforms instituted by the king and his government. To break the deadlock, Bismarck told parliament that “great questions will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron,” and he went ahead with the royal policies in spite of parliamentary opposition. In spite of his reputation as an old-fashioned Prussian monarchist, Bismarck was making an attempt to attract middle-class German nationalists to the support of the Prussian monarchy and its military establishment. When the newly reformed Prussian armies proved their effectiveness by defeating Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866 and by setting Prussia on the pathway toward a united Germany, Bismarck was a hero.

Now only France could block German unity. Through a masterful (if rather deceitful) set of diplomatic maneuvers, Bismarck forced the hand of Napoleon III, causing him to declare war on Prussia. Faced by the apparent aggression of a new Napoleon, the southern German states (except for Austria) joined with Prussian-dominated northern Germany. In the Franco-Prussian War that followed, France was defeated and the German Empire was proclaimed. Its capital was Berlin, and its reigning monarch was simultaneously the king of Prussia, William I; but the triumph was Bismarck’s.

Even his old enemies among the German liberals were forced to recognize Bismarck’s genius. Nevertheless, under the leadership of the Prussian-Jewish National Liberal politician Eduard Lasker, they pressured Bismarck to create a constitutional government for the newly formed empire. Bismarck’s constitution was a masterful manipulation of the political power structure of the age. It contained a popularly elected parliament to represent the people (the Reichstag), an aristocratic upper house to represent the princely German states (the Bundesrat), and a chancellor as the chief executive—himself. Only the emperor could appoint or dismiss the chancellor, and as long as Bismarck held the ear of William I, his position was secure. As a further means of controlling power, Bismarck retained the positions of Prussian prime minister and Prussian foreign minister throughout most of the period.

Bismarck was a man of great physical stature, who enjoyed the outdoor life of the country squire, riding horses and hunting game. He indulged himself in eating, drinking, and smoking, and, though he fell ill from time to time, he revived again and again with great vigor. He was an eloquent speaker, though with an amazingly high-pitched voice, and he was a master of the German language. He loved the domestic haven of his family life, and he was capable of bitter hatred of his political opponents, at home and abroad. For a statesman famed for his cool exploitation of realistic politics, he showed surprisingly irrational passion when faced with determined opposition.

Bismarck continued to face both domestic and foreign challenges throughout his tenure as chancellor. He opposed the power of the Catholic Center Party in the so-called Kulturkampf, the German version of the struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern state. He sought to limit the growth of the Social Democratic Party by a combination of social legislation and limits on the political freedoms of left-wing parties. He exploited the forces of anti-Semitism and economic nationalism to undermine the German liberal and progressive parties. He made many political enemies, but he was able to retain power by balancing forces against one another and shifting coalitions among political groups.

In foreign affairs, Bismarck used the talents he had once displayed in causing three wars to keep the peace once he had achieved his major goal of German unity. He caused great bitterness in France by taking Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. However, he simultaneously wooed Austria and Russia, establishing a “Three Emperors’ League” among the three conservative states to preserve the status quo. Bismarck organized the Congress of Berlin of 1878 to settle conflicts in the Balkans, and when it was successful he chose for himself the title of the “honest broker.” As nationalism in eastern Europe and colonial rivalries overseas continued to threaten the peace of the world, Bismarck skillfully sailed the German ship of state on the safest course he could.

In 1890, however, the seventy-five-year-old Bismarck clashed with his new sovereign, the thirty-one-year-old Emperor William II . When the young man wanted to do things his own way and forced Bismarck to resign, the British magazine Punch published one of the most famous cartoons in history, entitled “Dropping the Pilot.” Bismarck retired to his estates, where he was the object of honors from the great and powerful and much adulation from the public. However, he loved the reality of power, not mere applause, and he died in 1898, a frustrated and embittered man in his eighty-third year.

Significance

Otto von Bismarck is known to history as the “blood and iron chancellor” and a practitioner of realpolitik. He was no sentimental humanitarian, and military power always figured strongly in his calculations. However, he was not a single-minded dictator or heavy-handed militarist as he is sometimes portrayed.

Above all, Bismarck was a diplomat and a politician. He kept open several options as long as possible before choosing a final course of action. His shift from a parliamentary alliance with the liberals during the 1870s to an alliance with the Catholics and the conservatives during the 1880s was designed to achieve a single goal: the perpetuation of the power of the traditional elites of feudal and monarchical Germany and the emerging elites of business and industry. Prior to Bismarck, liberalism and nationalism seemed inevitably linked, and those movements were opposed by the aristocratic establishment; Bismarck broke that link and attached German nationalism to the Prussian conservatism that he valued.

For all of his skill, walking the tightropes of domestic and foreign policy as Prussian prime minister and German chancellor for twenty-eight years, he could not create a system that would endure. The forces of liberalism and socialism continued to grow, pushing Germany toward either democracy or revolution, and the Hohenzollern monarchs were swept away in 1918. The forces of radical nationalism and pan-German racism were not checked by the new republic, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazism led Germany to disaster between 1933 and 1945. The German unity that Bismarck created lasted only twenty years after his death, and the map of the German-speaking states of Europe after 1945 bears little resemblance to that of Bismarckian Germany. Nevertheless, in a country that saw so much political instability and military defeat in the twentieth century, the figure of Bismarck still looms large and continues to fascinate practitioners of statecraft and writers of history.

Bibliography

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Kent, George O. Bismarck and His Times. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Print.

Lerman, Katharine Anne. Bismarck. New York: Pearson, 2004. Print.

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Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Trans. Kim Traynor. Dover: Berg, 1985. Print.