Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck: The Man Who Assembled Germany

Days after Wilhelm I made him Minister President in September 1862, Bismarck told a hostile budget committee that the great questions of the age would not be resolved by speeches and majority resolutions but by iron and blood. It was a threat, a prophecy and a job description. Within nine years he had fought three wars, dismantled the old German Confederation, and stood in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles while a Prussian king was proclaimed German Emperor. Then he spent twenty years trying to freeze the continent in place.

The Junker Who Read Law

He was born on 1 April 1815 at Schönhausen, into the Prussian landowning caste — his father a former army officer of old Junker stock, his mother from Berlin's educated bourgeoisie and its civil-service families. The family moved to the Pomeranian estate of Kniephof in 1816. Bismarck read law at Göttingen from 1832 and Berlin from 1833, added agriculture at Greifswald in 1838, and abandoned the legal career. He served in the army reserve and ran the family estates. He was a genuine linguist, at ease in English, French, Italian, Polish and Russian — an asset he used for the rest of his life at other people's negotiating tables.

Conversion and the United Diet

In 1847 he married Johanna von Puttkamer and converted to Pietist Protestantism, which supplied the conservative frame he never abandoned. That same year he entered Prussia's United Diet and made his name as an unembarrassed royalist reactionary, opposing the liberals through the revolutions of 1848. The apprenticeship that mattered came next: envoy to the German Confederation's Diet at Frankfurt from 1851 to 1857, where daily friction with Austria taught him that Prussia's interests and conservative solidarity were not the same thing, followed by ambassadorships to St Petersburg and Paris. He entered office in 1862 a reactionary and left the decade a conservative who would use any tool that worked.

Blood and Iron

Wilhelm I appointed him Minister President and Foreign Minister on 23 September 1862 to break a deadlock: the Prussian parliament would not fund the army reorganisation the king wanted. Bismarck's solution was to find a gap in the constitution and simply collect taxes without a budget for four years. It was a straightforward breach of parliamentary government, and it established the pattern: constitutional forms preserved, constitutional substance ignored.

Three Wars

The Second Schleswig War of 1864 was fought alongside Austria against Denmark and left the two victors jointly administering territory they were bound to quarrel over. The quarrel came in 1866: Prussia smashed Austria at Königgrätz, expelled it from German affairs, and replaced the old Confederation with a North German Confederation under Prussian control. The last piece was France. In 1870 he edited the Ems Dispatch into a form calculated to enrage Paris, France declared war, and the southern German states came in on Prussia's side. On 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles. Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine — a decision historians generally regard as a tragic mistake, since it guaranteed permanent French hostility to a state whose safety depended on French acquiescence.

Enemies of the Empire

As Chancellor he governed by identifying *Reichsfeinde*, enemies of the empire, and going after them. First the Catholics: the Kulturkampf, run by his minister Adalbert Falk from the early 1870s, imposed civil marriage, restricted the clergy, dissolved religious orders, expelled the Jesuits and imprisoned bishops. It failed completely. Persecution welded Germany's Catholic third to the Centre Party and to its leader Ludwig Windthorst, whom Bismarck loathed, and he relented after Pius IX died in 1878.

Then the socialists, whom he had hated since the Paris Commune of 1871 and described as enemies bent on pillage and murder who should be exterminated. After two assassination attempts on Wilhelm I he banned the Social Democratic Party in 1878, renewing the law until 1890. That failed too: socialist representation grew from two seats in 1871 to thirty-five by 1890. In 1878–79 he dropped free trade for protective tariffs on iron and grain, breaking with the liberals and binding himself to the Junkers.

The most durable thing he did was the alternative half of the anti-socialist strategy. Sickness insurance came in 1883, funded by employers and workers together; accident insurance, employer-funded, in 1884; old-age pensions in 1889, payable at seventy. The motive was nakedly instrumental — to detach workers from the Social Democrats — and the result was the world's first modern welfare state, which reduced emigration and mortality and gave workers a seat in health administration. Every subsequent national insurance scheme is descended from it.

Five Balls in the Air

After 1871 the arsonist became a fire marshal. Germany was sated, he said, and now needed a Europe too tangled to attack it. He built the League of the Three Emperors in 1873, brokered the Congress of Berlin in 1878, signed the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, added Italy to make the Triple Alliance in 1882, and kept a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia from 1887 — a set of commitments that partly contradicted one another and that only he could hold together. France stayed isolated; the continent stayed quiet. A.J.P. Taylor's verdict was that Bismarck "was an honest broker of peace; and his system of alliances compelled every Power... to follow a peaceful course." He acquired colonies in 1883–84 despite having called them a waste of money, taking Togoland, Kamerun, German East Africa and German New Guinea, and hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. In 1890 the young Wilhelm II, impatient with the whole arrangement, dismissed him. He retired to write his memoirs and died on 30 July 1898.

Why Otto Is Called a Genius

Historians who dislike everything he stood for still use the phrase "diplomatic genius," and the substance behind it is specific. Bismarck's faculty was not originality of thought — he produced no doctrine and read little theory — but an extraordinary capacity to hold several contingent futures in mind simultaneously and to act in ways that kept the maximum number of them available. He fought Austria in 1866 and made it his principal ally thirteen years later. He built an alliance system with deliberately incompatible obligations and ran it for nearly two decades without it breaking. Jonathan Steinberg identified the combination that made it possible: ruthlessness plus flexibility of principle, in a man with no fixed commitments except to Prussian power.

The counter-case is heavy. Queen Victoria found him "overbearing, violent, grasping, and unprincipled," which was accurate. His two great domestic campaigns both failed on their own terms: the Kulturkampf strengthened political Catholicism, and the anti-socialist laws grew the Social Democrats seventeenfold. Alsace-Lorraine poisoned Franco-German relations for three generations. He rigged Prussian finances against parliament in 1862 and never accepted that a legislature might govern, so the empire he built industrialised at enormous speed while its political system stayed frozen — Britannica's judgment is that he was the last representative of the ancien régime, who introduced a vicious rhetoric of internal enemies that outlived him. And a system that only one man can operate is a design flaw, not a triumph: within a few years of his dismissal the wires he had strung were crossed, and by 1914 they were pulling in opposite directions.

Legacy

Modern Germany, the modern welfare state, and the modern vocabulary of *Realpolitik* all trace to him, which is a strange trio to owe one man. He proved that a state could be assembled by calculation rather than sentiment, and that social insurance could be a weapon of conservative politics. He also left his successors a country in the middle of Europe with a grievance on its western border and an emperor who thought the whole intricate machine could be run by instinct.

Achievements

• auscultator (1835–1836)
• Referendar (1836–1837)
• Referendar (1837–1838)
• Dijkgraaf (from 1846)
• Lifesaving Medal
• Order of the Crown
• Order of the Black Eagle — 1864
• Supreme Order of Christ
• Educated at Plamannsche Erziehungsanstalt and Evangelisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster