Otto von Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor and the Unification of Germany

Few statesmen of the modern age have so completely impressed their personal will upon the political destiny of a great people as Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen, the Junker landowner from the sandy plains east of the Elbe who, between his appointment as Minister-President of Prussia in September 1862 and his dismissal as Chancellor of the German Empire in March 1890, transformed a loose constellation of thirty-nine sovereign German states into a single federal empire, established that empire as the dominant power on the European continent, and constructed around it an intricate system of diplomatic understandings which preserved the peace of Europe for nearly two decades after his unifying wars. He was a man whose physical presence was as outsized as his historical role, a giant of more than six feet in an age when Europeans were on average considerably shorter than they later became, with the heavy frame, ruddy complexion, and prodigious appetite of the East Elbian aristocracy from which he sprang, and with a high, surprisingly thin voice that became one of the most arresting instruments of nineteenth-century parliamentary oratory. He was, by general agreement of those who observed him at close range, the most formidable political personality of his century, a man whose combination of intellectual quickness, psychological insight, theatrical instinct, and sheer ruthlessness in the pursuit of his aims placed him, in the estimation of his contemporaries and of subsequent historians, in the very first rank of European statesmen, alongside the cardinal Richelieu, the elder Pitt, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The political achievement which he engineered between 1862 and 1871 was, by any measure, one of the most consequential transformations of the European state system since the settlement at Westphalia in 1648 and at Vienna in 1815. He fought and won three short, sharp wars in the space of seven years, against Denmark in 1864, against the Austrian Empire in 1866, and against the Second French Empire in 1870, each conflict carefully provoked and prepared in advance, each fought with overwhelming Prussian military superiority, and each terminated by a peace settlement of moderation that left the defeated power chastened but not destroyed and incorporated the territorial fruits of victory into the growing Prussian-German state. The cumulative effect of these wars was to evict the Habsburg monarchy from German affairs, to bring the small and medium-sized German states north and south of the Main into a single political and military system under Prussian leadership, and to proclaim, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on the eighteenth of January 1871, in the presence of the assembled princes of Germany and amidst the broken majesty of the defeated French nation, the establishment of the German Empire with King Wilhelm I of Prussia as its first emperor. That ceremony, more than any other event of the nineteenth century, redrew the political map of Europe and inaugurated a new geopolitical era in which a unified Germany of forty million inhabitants, possessing the most professionally trained army in the world, the most rapidly expanding industrial economy on the continent, and a singularly able political leadership, replaced the divided Germany of the old Confederation as one of the principal poles of the European state system.

What followed the unification was equally consequential. For nineteen years after the foundation of the Empire, Bismarck served as Chancellor of the Reich and Minister-President of Prussia, exercising over German domestic and foreign policy a personal control unmatched by any statesman of comparable longevity in modern European history. He constructed at home a system of conservative parliamentary management combining universal manhood suffrage with a federal structure that preserved Prussian dominance, the introduction of compulsory accident, sickness, and old-age insurance schemes that established the foundations of the modern welfare state and remain in modified form the basis of German social policy today, the legal persecution of political Catholicism in the so-called Kulturkampf of the 1870s and its subsequent abandonment, and the systematic exclusion of the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party from legal political activity through the anti-socialist laws of 1878 to 1890. He constructed abroad a system of overlapping alliances and treaty obligations that came to be known as the Bismarckian system, designed to isolate the defeated France of the 1870s, to manage the increasingly bitter rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Balkans, to maintain peace among the great powers of Europe, and to permit the newly unified Germany to consolidate its position as a satisfied power with no further territorial ambitions on the continent. The system functioned, with periodic adjustments, throughout his tenure of office, and its collapse in the years after his dismissal in 1890 was widely understood at the time, and has been understood by historians ever since, as one of the principal preconditions of the diplomatic alignment that produced the First World War.

The Bismarck whom history remembers was thus simultaneously the architect of German unity and the architect of European peace, an extraordinarily conservative man who built upon foundations the most liberal of his contemporaries could only have wished for, a Prussian Junker who became the most modern of European statesmen, a man whose political imagination was at once narrowly national and broadly continental, a master of public theater who was happiest in his country estates with his dogs and his pipe, a believer in monarchy by divine right who manipulated kings and emperors as instruments of his policy, and a Christian convert who pursued his political ends with a moral flexibility that scandalized both the liberals and the pietists of his age. He was loved and hated in his own time with an intensity that political figures rarely arouse, and he has been loved and hated by historians of subsequent generations with an intensity that has not noticeably diminished. He was, and remains, the most studied, the most controversial, and the most consequential of the figures of nineteenth-century European political history.

The biography that follows traces in detail the long path from the Schönhausen of his birth in April 1815 to the Friedrichsruh of his death in July 1898: the early years on the family estates in Pomerania and Brandenburg, the schooldays in Berlin, the university years at Göttingen and Berlin, the years of dissipation and apparent failure as a young Junker squire, the religious conversion and the marriage to Johanna von Puttkamer that gave shape and purpose to his life, the entry into politics at the United Diet of 1847 and the conservative reaction to the revolutions of 1848, the diplomatic apprenticeship at Frankfurt and St Petersburg, the appointment as Minister-President in the constitutional crisis of 1862, the wars of unification, the proclamation of the Empire, the long chancellorship and the construction of the Bismarckian system, the bitter conflict with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, the dismissal in March 1890, the retirement at Friedrichsruh, and the death and the funeral that closed a life of seventy-three years lived very nearly at the center of European political history. It is a story in which the highest reaches of statecraft, the practical realities of a Prussian country estate, the dynamics of a singularly close and intense marriage, and the dynamics of nineteenth-century European diplomacy are interwoven into a single human life of remarkable will, remarkable ambition, and remarkable historical consequence.

Birth in Schönhausen and the Junker Inheritance

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen was born on the first of April 1815 at the manor house of Schönhausen in the Altmark, the old western march of Brandenburg, twelve miles south of the small town of Stendal and some sixty miles west of Berlin. The date was a coincidence on which he himself made much in later life, observing with characteristic dryness that he had been born on All Fools' Day, and the place was one to which he would return throughout his life as the original seat of his family and the symbolic center of his Junker identity. Schönhausen had been in the possession of the Bismarcks since 1562, when Otto's distant ancestor Friedrich von Bismarck had acquired the estate from the Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, and it remained until the Second World War the principal home of the elder line of the family. The manor house in which he was born, a long two-story building of austere baroque construction set amidst the flat fields and scattered woodlands of the Elbe plain, had been built in 1700 and refashioned in the early nineteenth century, and it stood at the heart of the agricultural estate that had been the economic foundation of the Bismarcks for more than two and a half centuries.

The family into which Otto was born was an ancient one, traceable in the records of the Mark Brandenburg as far back as 1270, when a certain Herebord von Bismarck appeared in the documents of the city of Stendal. The Bismarcks belonged to the lesser nobility of the East Elbian lands, the so-called Junkers, who had emerged in the high medieval period as the military aristocracy of the colonization of the Slavic territories east of the Elbe, who had through the early modern period consolidated their position as a landholding warrior caste in the service of the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg, and who had through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided the officer corps and the administrative cadres of the Prussian state created by the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm and his successors. The Bismarcks were not among the great names of the Prussian aristocracy. They had produced no field marshals, no leading statesmen, no figures of the first rank in Prussian history; they were country squires of modest fortune, holding their estates on the margins of the agricultural economy, intermarrying with the surrounding Junker families, and producing in each generation a quota of officers for the Prussian army, ministers for the country churches of the Lutheran establishment, and minor officials for the bureaucracy of the Prussian state. They were, in the phrase of the family chroniclers, an old but not a distinguished house, deeply rooted in the soil of Brandenburg, conscientious in their service to the Prussian state, and conservative in their political and religious instincts.

Otto's father, Ferdinand von Bismarck, who was fifty-three years old at the time of his son's birth, was a quintessential representative of this East Elbian Junker class. He had been born in 1771 at Schönhausen, had served as a young officer in the Prussian army during the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, had retired from military service in 1798 at the rank of captain, and had thereafter devoted himself to the management of the family estates and to the conventional pursuits of his class. He was a tall, heavily built man of placid temperament, of moderate intellectual endowment, of strong but unreflective Lutheran piety, and of the kind of practical agricultural competence that the management of a country estate required. He was, his son would later say with affectionate condescension, a typical Junker of the old school, slow of thought but sound of judgment, indifferent to the world of books and ideas but capable in the management of land and men, and possessed of the conservative loyalties to king, church, and class that were the characteristic political furniture of his caste. He had married late, at the age of thirty-five, having chosen as his wife a woman considerably younger than himself, considerably more cultivated than himself, and considerably more ambitious for her children than the conventions of his class would have led one to expect.

Otto's mother, Wilhelmine Luise Mencken, was twenty-five at the time of his birth, eighteen years younger than her husband, and possessed of an intellectual and social background quite different from the Junker world into which she had married. She came from the bourgeois academic and bureaucratic class of Berlin and Leipzig, the descendant on her father's side of a distinguished family of jurists and university professors. Her grandfather Gottfried Ludwig Mencken had been a professor of philosophy at Leipzig, and her father Anastasius Ludwig Mencken had been a high official in the Prussian state service under Friedrich Wilhelm II and Friedrich Wilhelm III, rising to become a privy councillor and the principal political secretary to the king. Wilhelmine had been brought up in this cultivated bureaucratic milieu in Berlin, had received an excellent education in languages, music, and literature, and had moved as a young woman in the intellectual and political circles of the Prussian capital. Her marriage to Ferdinand von Bismarck, arranged through family connections and contracted in 1806 when she was only sixteen years old, had transplanted her from the cosmopolitan world of Berlin to the provincial isolation of the Schönhausen estate, and the resulting tension between her temperament and her circumstances would shape, in profound and ultimately problematic ways, the upbringing of her children.

The marriage of Ferdinand and Wilhelmine produced six children, of whom three survived infancy: Bernhard von Bismarck, born in 1810, who would inherit Schönhausen and live the conventional life of a Pomeranian country squire; Otto Eduard Leopold, born in 1815, the future chancellor; and Malwine von Bismarck, born in 1827, who would marry a Junker landowner named Oskar von Arnim-Kröchlendorff and live a life of conventional aristocratic respectability. The three surviving Bismarck children grew up in the curious cultural environment created by their parents' very different backgrounds: a household formally devoted to the Junker values of conservative loyalty and rural simplicity but informally infused with their mother's bourgeois ambition for her children's intellectual and social advancement, a household combining the country pursuits of riding, shooting, and the management of land with the aspirational reading and conversation that Wilhelmine brought to it from her Berlin youth.

Childhood at Kniephof and in Berlin

When Otto was less than a year old, the Bismarck family moved from Schönhausen in the Altmark to a larger estate at Kniephof in Hinterpommern, the eastern part of Pomerania, near the small town of Naugard, some hundred and twenty miles north-east of Berlin. The move had been precipitated by the inheritance, on the death of Ferdinand's brother Carl Friedrich von Bismarck in 1815, of three substantial estates in Hinterpommern: Kniephof, which was the largest and which became the new family seat; Külz, a few miles to the north; and Jarchlin, a few miles to the east. These three Pomeranian estates, taken together with the older property at Schönhausen which Ferdinand also retained, made the Bismarcks one of the more substantial landholding families of the East Elbian aristocracy, with somewhere between five and six thousand acres of agricultural land at their disposal and the income of a country gentleman of comfortable but not opulent means. The Bismarcks would remain at Kniephof for the next twenty years, and Otto's earliest memories were of the rolling Pomeranian countryside, the dark fir forests, the small lakes and streams, the heavy clay soils, and the harsh winters of the Baltic plain.

The childhood at Kniephof was, in its outward forms, a conventional Junker boyhood. Otto learned to ride almost before he could walk, learned to shoot at an early age, learned the management of fields and forests and livestock from the conversations of his father and the estate manager, and absorbed without conscious instruction the assumptions of the rural aristocracy: the natural superiority of the landowning class, the duty of personal service to the king of Prussia, the deference to Lutheran religion as the established faith of the state, the contempt for the peasants and townsmen who lived around them, and the easy familiarity with the natural world of fields and forests that was the principal compensation for the relative cultural impoverishment of country life. He was a robust, energetic, sometimes wild boy, given to physical adventures of a dangerous kind, possessed of a quick intelligence that his country tutors found difficult to keep occupied, and inclined from an early age to a certain emotional volatility that his more equable elder brother Bernhard never displayed.

The decisive influence on Otto's early development was, however, not his father, whose placid temperament and limited intellectual range left little impression on his more energetic son, but his mother Wilhelmine, whose ambition for his future and whose insistence on his early removal from the country environment of Kniephof would shape, for better and for worse, the course of his education and the formation of his personality. Wilhelmine had never reconciled herself to the rural isolation of Pomeranian life. She found the conversation of her Junker neighbors tedious, the cultural amenities of the small towns of Hinterpommern inadequate, and the prospects for her sons' advancement in such an environment hopelessly limited. She believed, with the conviction of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie of her own family, that her sons must be educated to take their place not in the conservative country gentry of Pomerania but in the rising professional and administrative classes of Berlin, and she insisted, against her husband's preferences, that the boys be sent to school in the capital from an early age. The decision was a contested one within the family, and Otto would later attribute to it many of the unhappinesses of his school years and many of the difficulties of his subsequent emotional relationship with his mother.

In the summer of 1821, when Otto was six years old, he was sent with his elder brother Bernhard to the Plamann Institute in Berlin, a private boarding school in the Wilhelmstrasse run by a disciple of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The Plamann school was a progressive institution by the standards of the time, devoted to a regime of physical exercise, intellectual discipline, and moral formation that its founders considered superior to the conventional Latin grammar schools of the period. The reality, as Otto experienced it, was a regime of harsh discipline, indifferent food, cold dormitories, and pedagogic methods that emphasized rote learning and corporal punishment. He was unhappy at the Plamann school throughout the six years that he spent there, missed the freedom of the Pomeranian countryside, resented his removal from his mother and his father, and developed in those years a lifelong dislike of cities, of formal schools, and of the bourgeois urban culture that his mother had wanted him to absorb. He would later say, with the bitterness that always entered his voice when he spoke of his childhood, that the years at the Plamann school had been a kind of imprisonment, that he had felt himself a Junker among bourgeois schoolboys, and that he had emerged from those years with a settled hostility to everything that the school and the city represented.

The relationship with his mother, on which the decision to send him to Berlin had depended, was permanently damaged by the experience of those years. Otto would maintain a polite formal correspondence with Wilhelmine throughout her life, would visit her with proper filial deference, would honor her memory after her death in 1839, and would speak of her in public terms of conventional respect. But the affection that a child might be expected to feel for a mother was missing, and the bitterness that he privately felt toward her for what he considered her abandonment of him to the discomforts of urban schooling found expression, throughout his life, in remarks of cold dismissiveness whenever the subject of his childhood came up in private conversation. He would say, in his old age, that he had never loved his mother, that he had loved his father in a kind of practical, undemonstrative way, but that the dominant emotional experience of his early years had been a sense of having been pushed aside by a mother whose ambitions for him had outweighed her concern for his happiness. The judgment was harsh and probably unjust, but it was the judgment that he himself formed and that he held throughout his life.

School Years and the Graues Kloster

In 1827, at the age of twelve, Otto left the Plamann school and entered the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin, a leading classical secondary school of the Prussian capital, where he would remain until 1830. He moved at that point to the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, the Gray Cloister Gymnasium, the oldest and most academically distinguished of the Berlin grammar schools, where he completed his secondary education and took his Abitur, the school-leaving examination that qualified him for university study, in the spring of 1832. The years at the Graues Kloster were, by his own later account, somewhat more agreeable than the years at the Plamann school, in part because he was older and more able to manage the routines of urban schooling, in part because the academic discipline was less harsh, and in part because he had begun, in the manner of an adolescent of his class, to find his own private compensations for the constraints of the school timetable.

The intellectual abilities that he displayed at the Graues Kloster were considerable, though uneven. He had inherited from his mother a quick verbal intelligence, a strong sense of language, and an unusual capacity for the rapid assimilation of complex material. He learned Latin and Greek with facility, though without any deep love for the classical authors; he learned French and English with even greater facility, and would by the time of his Abitur read both languages with the ease of a native speaker and write both languages with a degree of polish that would serve him well in his later diplomatic career. He read widely in history and in political theory, though his interest in those subjects was practical rather than philosophical and he never developed the kind of systematic theoretical interest in political ideas that characterized some of his more intellectually inclined contemporaries. He was indifferent to mathematics and the natural sciences, which he found tedious, and his school reports through the years at the Graues Kloster show a consistent pattern of high marks in languages and history coupled with mediocre performance in mathematics and the more technical subjects.

His character at school was already recognizably the character he would display in later life. He was tall for his age, robust, physically restless, and quick to take offense. He was intellectually quick but not particularly hardworking, capable of absorbing material rapidly when he chose to apply himself but unwilling to expend effort on subjects or activities that did not engage his interest. He was sociable in a particular way, easy with the boys of his own class and inclined to dominate them by force of personality, but standoffish with those whom he considered his social inferiors, and incapable of the kind of democratic friendliness that some of his teachers wished he would cultivate. He was already, in adolescence, displaying the combination of intellectual confidence, social arrogance, and political conservatism that would mark his adult life, and his school reports include various comments from teachers who recognized his abilities but worried about the formation of his character.

He took his Abitur in the spring of 1832, at the age of seventeen, with results sufficient to qualify him for any university in Germany but without the particular distinction that some of his classmates achieved. The decision about his future course of study had been the subject of family discussion for several years and had ultimately been resolved, against his own preferences, in favor of a career in the Prussian state service. His mother had insisted upon this outcome, considering the military career that Otto himself would have preferred to be both socially limited and financially inadequate for the kind of future she envisaged for him. His father, who would have been content with any choice his son made, deferred to his wife's judgment as he generally did. Otto himself, who had a natural attraction to the military life and who would have preferred a career as a Prussian officer, accepted the decision with the resigned compliance of a young man who recognized that his economic dependence on his parents gave him no real alternative. He would, accordingly, study law and political science at the university, would qualify for the higher Prussian civil service, and would enter upon what his mother envisaged as a long and distinguished career in the administrative cadres of the Prussian state.

University Studies at Göttingen and Berlin

In the spring of 1832, shortly after passing his Abitur, Otto matriculated at the University of Göttingen, in the Kingdom of Hanover, one of the most distinguished universities of Germany and a particularly fashionable choice for the sons of the North German aristocracy. The selection of Göttingen rather than the Prussian universities at Berlin, Halle, or Königsberg reflected a certain aristocratic snobbery on the part of the Bismarck family. Göttingen was the university of choice for the German nobility of the North, a place where the great Junker families of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and the Mark sent their sons in preference to the more bourgeois Prussian institutions, and the social atmosphere of the place was correspondingly aristocratic, expensive, and devoted at least as much to the pleasures of student life as to the disciplines of scholarship. Otto's father had been a student at Göttingen forty years before, in the years before the French Revolution, and the family connections of the Bismarcks were strong in the city.

Otto was, by his own later account and by all surviving evidence, a less than studious undergraduate. He attended lectures irregularly, devoted relatively little time to the formal study of law that was supposed to be his principal occupation, and gave himself instead to the pleasures of student life on the heroic scale that his physical strength and his Junker confidence made possible. He drank prodigiously, fought duels with the same enthusiasm that other young men brought to academic study, accumulated debts of an alarming kind, traveled widely in the surrounding country on horseback and in the company of similarly disposed young aristocrats, and acquired during his Göttingen years the reputation of being one of the wildest and most flamboyant students of his cohort. He fought, by the careful count he later kept, twenty-eight duels during his university years, of which he was the victor in all but one, a single occasion on which he received a flesh wound to the cheek which left him with a permanent scar that he would carry for the rest of his life. He smoked heavily, drank still more heavily, kept a large dog called Ariel which became something of a Göttingen institution, and was on familiar terms with the police of the city through frequent encounters with the authorities over the consequences of his nocturnal exploits.

He was not, however, an entirely dissolute young man, and the more sober and analytical side of his nature found expression during the Göttingen years in two characteristic developments. The first was the formation of friendships with a small circle of more intellectually serious students from across the German states, of whom the most important was the American John Lothrop Motley, the future historian of the Dutch Republic, who became one of Otto's closest friends and whose correspondence with him over the following decades preserves much of the most valuable evidence about the young Bismarck's character and intellectual development. The friendship with Motley, which was an unusual one across the Atlantic in the period, displayed already the cosmopolitan curiosity and the willingness to engage with foreign cultures that would mark Otto's later diplomatic career. The second was the development of an interest in political reading and reflection that, although it never assumed the form of systematic philosophical study, gave him a working acquaintance with the principal currents of European political thought of his time and prepared him for the political life that would soon enough engage his energies.

After three semesters at Göttingen, Otto transferred in the autumn of 1833 to the University of Berlin, where he completed his legal studies and took his examinations for the higher Prussian civil service. The years at Berlin were quieter and more academically productive than the years at Göttingen had been. He lived under the eye of his Berlin relatives, attended lectures more regularly, applied himself more seriously to the technicalities of Prussian law, and prepared himself, with the discipline that he could apply when circumstances required it, for the examinations he would have to pass. He took the first of his civil service examinations, the Auskultatur, in 1835, qualifying him for entry into the lower ranks of the Prussian judicial service, and he completed the second, the Referendariat, in 1836, qualifying him for advancement to the higher civil service. The path that his mother had envisaged for him appeared to be opening, and the young Bismarck appeared to be on his way to the conventional career of a Prussian administrative officer.

The Brief Attempt at a Bureaucratic Career

Otto entered the Prussian civil service in the autumn of 1836, at the age of twenty-one, as an unpaid trainee at the municipal court of Aachen, in the recently acquired Rhenish provinces of the kingdom. The choice of Aachen was a deliberate one on the part of the authorities of the Prussian Ministry of Justice, who liked to send their young Junker trainees to the western provinces for a period of seasoning that would acquaint them with the more advanced economic and social conditions of the Rhineland and would, it was hoped, broaden their political horizons beyond the conservative provincialism of their East Elbian upbringing. The reality of the Aachen posting, as Otto experienced it, was rather different from what the ministry had intended. The work of the municipal court was tedious in the extreme, consisting principally of routine commercial cases involving the textile manufactures of the city, and Otto, who had no patience for the technical minutiae of legal procedure and no interest in the commercial life of the Rhineland, found himself almost immediately at odds with both the work and the social environment. He neglected his official duties, spent his time and what little money he had on the pursuits of fashionable society in the city, and conducted himself in a manner that quickly attracted the disapproval of his superiors.

The Aachen of the 1830s was a fashionable spa town as well as an industrial center, and the season at Aachen drew visitors from across western Europe, including a substantial English contingent who came for the waters and remained for the social entertainments. Otto threw himself into this society with the same enthusiasm that he had brought to student life at Göttingen, contracting a romantic attachment to a young English lady named Isabella Loraine-Smith, the niece of a duke, with whom he became engaged and whom he proposed to follow back to England. The engagement was broken off after a few months when Isabella's family, alarmed at the prospect of a marriage between their niece and an obscure Prussian civil service trainee with no fortune and uncertain prospects, intervened to remove her from his company. He requested and obtained, with some difficulty, a leave of absence from his post in Aachen in order to follow her to various spa towns in Germany and to England, an unauthorized extension of his leave that produced a sharply critical letter from the Ministry of Justice and that constituted, in the formal record, the first of several breaches of professional discipline that would mark his short and undistinguished civil service career.

In the autumn of 1837 he was transferred, at his own request and with the relieved consent of his superiors at Aachen, to the government office at Potsdam, the seat of the Brandenburg provincial administration. The Potsdam posting was a step closer to home and offered the prospect of a more congenial social environment, but Otto's enthusiasm for the routine of bureaucratic life had not increased with the change of scene. He performed his official duties with the minimum of attention and the maximum of resentment, found the regulations and the petty hierarchies of the Prussian administrative system intolerable, and complained constantly in his letters to friends and family of the indignities of subordination and the tedium of bureaucratic existence. He had, he would say afterward, the temperament of a master and not of a servant, and the Prussian civil service of the Vormärz period was a system in which every official, however high his eventual rank, served his apprenticeship in conditions of strict subordination that the young Bismarck found increasingly intolerable.

Matters were brought to a head in the summer of 1838 by his decision to undertake his year of compulsory military service, which he had postponed during his university and early professional years and which he could no longer defer without forfeiting his eligibility for the higher civil service. He requested, and was granted, leave from his Potsdam post to serve a year as a one-year volunteer in the Garde-Jäger battalion of the Prussian army, a unit of mounted riflemen attached to the royal household, in which the year of service was an established custom for young men of his class. He served his year with the relish that had been absent from his civil service work, found the discipline and the comradeship of the army congenial in a way that bureaucratic life had never been, and emerged from it confirmed in his suspicion that he had made the wrong career choice. He returned to Potsdam for the remaining months of his civil service obligation with the increasingly settled intention of abandoning the bureaucratic career altogether, and the decision was made effectively irrevocable by the death of his mother Wilhelmine in January 1839, which freed him from the principal personal pressure that had pushed him into the civil service in the first place. He resigned from the Prussian state service in the spring of 1839 and returned to the family estates in Pomerania, intending to take over the management of the agricultural properties of the Bismarcks and to live the conventional life of a country squire.

The Wild Years as a Young Junker

The years between 1839 and 1845, which Otto spent principally on the family estates at Kniephof and Schönhausen as a young landowner managing the agricultural properties of the Bismarcks, have come to be known to biographers as the wild years, a period of energy without direction, of vigor without purpose, and of social escapades on the heroic scale. He was twenty-four when he returned to the country, and the experience of failure at the civil service had left him in a curious state of unfocused energy, conscious of his own abilities and of the unsatisfactory limits of the country gentleman's life but without any clear vision of an alternative future. He devoted himself to the management of the estates with a competence that surprised his neighbors and to the pleasures of country life with an enthusiasm that scandalized them. He acquired the local nickname of the mad Bismarck, partly in tribute to the energy with which he applied himself to the agricultural improvements that he undertook on the Pomeranian properties, partly in derision of the wild parties, the heavy drinking, the late-night rides through the countryside, the pranks of an increasingly outrageous kind, and the romantic adventures with the daughters of the surrounding country gentry that became the principal entertainments of his bachelor years.

He was, in the agricultural side of his activities, a serious and progressive landowner. He had inherited the responsibility for the Pomeranian estates upon the retirement of his father from active management, and he applied to them the kind of careful attention to detail that he had not given to his civil service work. He drained marshlands, introduced new crop rotations, improved the breeding of his sheep and cattle, modernized the estate buildings, and increased the agricultural yields of the properties substantially during the years of his management. He maintained careful accounts, studied the agricultural literature of the period, corresponded with progressive landowners in other parts of Germany and abroad, and earned a reputation in the country districts of Hinterpommern as one of the more capable and forward-looking landowners of his generation. The reputation was a real one, and it would later serve him politically in the conservative circles of the East Elbian aristocracy, who recognized in him not merely a man of striking abilities but a representative of the practical agricultural interests that they considered the proper foundation of Prussian political life.

He was, however, also a young man of restless temperament and of considerable physical energy, and the agricultural side of his life was insufficient to absorb his vitality. The wild parties for which he became notorious in the country districts of Hinterpommern were the principal outlet for the excess energy. He gathered around him a small group of similarly disposed young Junker friends, including in particular Moritz von Blanckenburg, Hans von Kleist-Retzow, and a few others whose names appear repeatedly in his correspondence of the period, and the parties at Kniephof and Schönhausen that he organized in the company of these friends became, in the lore of the East Elbian aristocracy, legends of riotous Junker hospitality. They drank prodigiously, fired pistol shots through the ceilings of the manor houses as a form of after-dinner amusement, rode at full gallop through the corridors and up the stairs of the country houses on dares and bets, conducted elaborate practical jokes on each other and on their guests, and pursued the local young women of their class with an energy that produced more scandals than marriages. The Otto of these years was a powerfully built young man of immense physical vitality, capable of drinking and riding and hunting for days on end without apparent fatigue, possessed of a quick wit and a capacity for outrageous theatrical effect that made him the center of every social gathering, and inclined to a moodiness that alternated abruptly with his more flamboyant social moments.

The intellectual side of his life during these years was not entirely neglected, though it was less conspicuous than the social side. He read widely in history, in political theory, and in literature, with a particular interest in the great political memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He learned Russian during one summer of intensive private study, with the help of a Russian tutor whom he engaged for the purpose, and acquired sufficient command of the language to read Russian literature in the original and to converse, if not with fluency, with intelligible accuracy in Russian. He traveled abroad, visiting France, Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands, and the journeys that he made during these years acquainted him with the political and social conditions of the principal western European states in ways that would later prove useful to his diplomatic career. He continued, throughout the period, to correspond with John Lothrop Motley and with a small circle of other intellectually serious friends, and the letters of the period preserve, alongside the accounts of the wild parties and the romantic adventures, the evidence of a continuous engagement with the political and intellectual questions of his time.

Religious Conversion and the Pietist Circle

The turning point of his early life came in the years between 1844 and 1847 through the parallel experiences of a religious conversion and a romantic engagement, the two together transforming the rudderless young Junker of the wild years into the focused and purposeful man who would enter politics in 1847 and embark upon the career that would lead him to the chancellorship. The religious conversion came through his connection with the circle of pietist landowners who clustered around the country estates of the Thaddens at Trieglaff and the Below-Hohendorf at Hohendorf, both in Pomerania within a few hours' ride of Kniephof, and who had become during the 1840s one of the principal centers of the Prussian conservative pietist movement. The pietists of this circle were Lutherans of an unusually intense and personal devotion, who combined an orthodox confessional theology with an emphasis on individual conversion, on the personal experience of grace, on the careful reading of scripture, and on the practical application of Christian principles to the conduct of estate management, family life, and political affairs.

Otto's connection with this circle came initially through his friend Moritz von Blanckenburg, who had become engaged in 1843 to Marie von Thadden, the eldest daughter of the Trieglaff family and one of the most spiritually intense young women of the Pomeranian pietist circle. Otto attended the engagement and subsequent wedding festivities at Trieglaff, found himself drawn into the religious atmosphere of the Thadden household, and began through the next several years to visit Trieglaff with increasing frequency. The contrast between the religious seriousness of the Thaddens and their circle and the irreligious vitality of his own bachelor existence began to work on him, slowly and at first reluctantly, and the example of Marie in particular, with her combination of physical vivacity and spiritual depth, made a deep impression on him. He was not yet, in any formal sense, a convert; he remained the wild young man of the country parties and the heavy drinking. But the seed of a religious transformation had been planted, and it would germinate in the course of the next few years.

The decisive event came in November 1846, when Marie von Thadden, who had married Moritz von Blanckenburg in 1844 and who had remained the spiritual center of the Pomeranian pietist circle, died suddenly of an illness of a few weeks' duration at the age of twenty-four. The death of Marie shook Otto profoundly. He had loved her, in his own complicated way, throughout the years of her marriage to his friend, had treasured her religious conversations and her unobtrusive influence on him, and had come to depend on her presence at Trieglaff as one of the principal positive emotional anchors of his life. Her death precipitated in him a crisis of feeling that resolved itself, over the course of the following months, into a definite religious conversion. He read scripture intensively, particularly the Psalms and the Gospel of John, prayed for the first time in his adult life with personal and not merely conventional intensity, and arrived through this process at a position of orthodox Lutheran faith of the pietist coloring of the Trieglaff circle, which he would maintain, with various oscillations of intensity, for the rest of his life.

Engagement and Marriage to Johanna Von Puttkamer

The other transformation of these years was his engagement and marriage to Johanna von Puttkamer, the daughter of one of the conservative pietist landowning families of the Trieglaff circle and a friend of Marie von Thadden from their girlhood. Johanna was a young woman of twenty-two when Otto first encountered her, in the autumn of 1846, at Trieglaff during one of his visits in the months before Marie's death. She was small and dark, plain by the standards of conventional beauty, intellectually shrewd, of strong but quiet religious convictions, and possessed of a personal dignity that impressed Otto from his earliest acquaintance with her. She was the daughter of Heinrich von Puttkamer of Reinfeld, a substantial Pomeranian landowner of conservative and pietist convictions, and of Luitgarde von Glasenapp, a woman of similar background and similar piety, and she had grown up in the religious and social atmosphere of the conservative pietist circle that had drawn Otto into its orbit.

The decision to propose marriage to Johanna came in the months after Marie's death, as Otto's religious conversion was taking shape and as he began to recognize the practical necessity of marriage if he was to escape the rudderless existence of his bachelor years. He made his proposal in the form of a long and carefully composed letter to her father Heinrich von Puttkamer in December 1846, a letter that has become famous in the literature on Bismarck as one of the most extraordinary documents of his life. In it he set out, with disarming honesty, the principal facts of his past life, including the religious indifference of his youth, the wild parties and the heavy drinking of his bachelor years, the romantic entanglements that had not led to marriage, and the recent religious conversion that had brought him to consider seriously the prospect of a marriage of which the family would approve. The letter was a remarkable document of self-presentation, neither evasive about the past nor falsely modest about the future, and it produced upon Heinrich von Puttkamer the effect that Otto had hoped for: an invitation to come to Reinfeld and to discuss the matter personally.

The marriage that began on the twenty-eighth of July 1847 at the Puttkamer estate of Reinfeld was, by every measure, the central personal relationship of Bismarck's life, and it would endure with extraordinary closeness and mutual devotion for the next forty-six years, until Johanna's death in November 1894. Their relationship combined a deep emotional intimacy with a practical division of roles that suited both their temperaments: Johanna, who was utterly indifferent to the public world of politics and society in which her husband moved, devoted herself to the management of his households, to the upbringing of their children, and to the creation of the protected domestic environment in which Otto could find refuge from the strains of his political life; Otto made of Johanna the principal personal confidante and emotional anchor of his existence, depended on her counsel in matters that he confided to no one else, and made of his returns to his various country estates, where Johanna presided, the principal source of psychological replenishment in a life of extraordinary public exposure. The marriage produced three children: Marie, born in 1848 and named for the dead Marie von Thadden; Herbert, born in 1849; and Wilhelm, known as Bill, born in 1852.

Entry into Politics: the United Diet of 1847

Bismarck's entry into political life came almost simultaneously with his marriage, in the spring of 1847, when he was elected as a substitute deputy to the United Diet which the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV had summoned to Berlin in April of that year. The United Diet was a novel institution in Prussian constitutional history, an assembly of representatives from the eight provincial diets of the Prussian monarchy summoned by the king for the limited purpose of approving new loans for the construction of railways, and constituted in effect a sort of consultative parliamentary body without the rights of a fully sovereign assembly. The summoning of the Diet had been the most important concession to liberal opinion that the king had been willing to make, and the body had been bitterly criticized by the liberal opposition as an inadequate substitute for the constitutional and representative institutions which they had demanded since the Wars of Liberation. Bismarck took his seat in this assembly in May 1847 as a substitute for a Pomeranian deputy who had fallen ill, and in the months that followed he established himself, by a series of bold and provocative interventions in the debates, as one of the most striking new conservative voices in Prussian political life.

His first speech to the Diet, delivered on the seventeenth of May 1847, made him immediately notorious throughout Germany. The debate had concerned the political and legal position of the Jews in Prussia, and the liberal deputies had argued that the patriotic conduct of Jewish soldiers in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon had earned the Jews of Prussia the right to full civic equality. Bismarck, in response, argued that the Wars of Liberation had been fought, by both Christians and Jews, in defense of the Prussian fatherland and the Prussian crown, not for the achievement of any particular legislative end, and that the patriotism of Jewish soldiers had not earned them any specific claim upon Prussian legislative reform. The argument was technically respectable but the tone in which Bismarck delivered it, with a combination of sardonic humor and aggressive sarcasm directed at the liberal opposition, gave to the speech a quality of personal provocation that produced an immediate sensation in the chamber and in the press. Bismarck had served notice that he intended to be a political fighter of the most aggressive kind, and the liberal opposition recognized in him at once a man of formidable capacities who would have to be reckoned with.

In the weeks that followed, he intervened repeatedly in the debates of the Diet, almost always on the most conservative side of the questions at issue, almost always with the same combination of intellectual sharpness and rhetorical aggression. He defended the divine right of the Hohenzollern monarchy, opposed the introduction of any genuine parliamentary control over the executive, defended the Junker privileges of the East Elbian aristocracy, and argued that the proper future for the Prussian state lay not in the imitation of the constitutional models of western Europe but in the preservation and consolidation of the conservative monarchical and aristocratic institutions that had made Prussia what she was. The positions he took during the months of the United Diet established him, by the summer of 1847, as one of the leading younger figures of the conservative party in Prussia, and they marked the beginning of his long political career as a champion of conservative Prussian particularism in the face of the liberal nationalist currents of the age.

The Revolutions of 1848 and Bismarck's Response

The political world in which Bismarck had begun to make himself known at the United Diet was overturned, in the spring of 1848, by the revolutionary upheavals that swept across the German states and the rest of central Europe in the months following the February revolution in Paris. The news of the overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second French Republic reached Berlin in the last days of February, was followed within a few weeks by uprisings in Vienna, in the smaller German capitals, and in the major cities of the German states, and culminated in Berlin in the bloody street fighting of the eighteenth and nineteenth of March, in which the city was barricaded by the popular forces of the revolution, the royal troops were withdrawn from the capital on the order of the bewildered Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and the king himself was compelled to ride bareheaded through the streets of his capital behind the funeral cortege of the revolutionary dead with a black-red-gold revolutionary cockade pinned to his breast. The shock of these events to the Prussian conservative aristocracy was profound, and Bismarck, who was at Schönhausen at the time and whose news from Berlin came through the unreliable channels of country gossip, reacted to them with the wild and characteristically theatrical impulsiveness that marked his behavior in the early months of the revolutionary year.

His first response was to attempt to organize the Pomeranian peasants of the Schönhausen and Kniephof estates into a counter-revolutionary force that would march upon Berlin to liberate the king from his revolutionary captivity. He distributed weapons to the peasants of his estates, assembled them with what military equipment he could collect, and set out for Potsdam with the intention of placing this irregular force at the disposal of the conservative party at court. The expedition, which would have been comic if it had not been seriously intended, was halted on the orders of the king himself, who declined the offered services of the irregular Bismarck contingent and instructed him to return to his estates. Bismarck, undeterred, then conceived the still more eccentric plan of inviting Princess Augusta, the wife of the heir presumptive Prince Wilhelm, to come to Schönhausen under his personal protection and to remain there until the revolutionary situation in Berlin should be resolved. The plan was emphatically rejected by Augusta, who had been one of the few members of the royal family with liberal sympathies and who regarded the young Bismarck as a dangerous and intolerable enthusiast. The episode created between Augusta and Bismarck a personal antipathy that would endure for the rest of their lives and that would form one of the principal personal complications of his later career, when Augusta became queen and afterward empress and would consistently use her influence at court against him.

When the dust of the spring of 1848 had begun to settle, Bismarck threw himself into the political reaction with the same energy that had marked his initial response to the revolution. He was an active participant in the founding of the conservative Kreuzzeitung, the organ of the East Elbian conservative party which began publication in June 1848 under the editorship of Hermann Wagener, and he became one of its most prolific contributors of articles and editorials in the months that followed. He was elected to the Prussian Constituent Assembly that the king had summoned to draw up a constitution for the kingdom, and he served in that body until its dissolution in December 1848. He was elected to the Prussian Lower House under the new constitution that the king had octroyé in December 1848, and he served in that body through the years 1849 to 1851 as one of the most active and outspoken members of the conservative party. Through all these activities he established himself as a leading voice of the Prussian counter-revolution and as one of the closest political allies of the court party that had gathered around the conservative ministers Otto von Manteuffel and the brothers Ludwig and Leopold von Gerlach.

His political position in the years 1848 to 1851 was a complicated one. He was a vehement opponent of the liberal nationalist movement that had emerged in the revolutionary year, considering its program of constitutional and national unity under bourgeois leadership to be a fatal threat to the conservative, monarchical, and aristocratic institutions of the Prussian state. He was equally hostile to the program of greater German unity that had been pursued by the Frankfurt Parliament during 1848 and 1849, and he had welcomed the rejection by Friedrich Wilhelm IV in April 1849 of the imperial crown that the Frankfurt deputies had offered him. He believed that the proper political program for Prussia was a defensive consolidation of her conservative institutions at home, combined with a foreign policy that maintained the alliance of the three eastern monarchies of Prussia, Austria, and Russia against the liberal threat from the west. The position he took during these years brought him into close political alliance with the Gerlach brothers, the leading figures of the conservative court party, and it earned him their patronage in the appointments to which he would shortly aspire.

Prussian Envoy to the Federal Diet at Frankfurt

In the spring of 1851, after the humiliation of Olmütz had brought to an end the Prussian attempt to establish a north German union under her own leadership, the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV nominated Bismarck, on the recommendation of Leopold von Gerlach, to the position of Prussian envoy to the restored Federal Diet at Frankfurt. The appointment was a startling one. Bismarck was thirty-six years old, had no diplomatic experience whatever, had only the four years of legislative activity at Berlin to his credit as preparation for the conduct of diplomatic affairs, and had been chosen for the Frankfurt post over a number of more senior candidates principally because his conservative credentials made him a reliable instrument of the policy of cooperation with Austria that the king and his ministers intended to pursue. He took up his new post in Frankfurt in July 1851 with a sense of mixed excitement at the new opportunities before him and apprehension at the unfamiliar responsibilities that he would have to discharge.

The Federal Diet at Frankfurt was a curious institution. It had been established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as the central executive organ of the German Confederation, the loose league of thirty-nine sovereign German states that had succeeded the Holy Roman Empire dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, and it consisted of a permanent committee of delegates from the member states meeting under the chairmanship of the Austrian envoy at Frankfurt am Main. The Diet had no genuine executive power, its decisions required the unanimity of its members on most important questions, and it had functioned principally during the Vormärz years as an instrument by which Metternich and the Austrian government had coordinated the conservative reaction in the German states. Its restoration in the spring of 1851, after the revolutionary interlude of 1848 to 1850, had been one of the principal results of the Austrian victory at Olmütz, and the Austrian delegate, the Count Friedrich Thun und Hohenstein, had returned to Frankfurt with the assumption that the old patterns of Austrian dominance over the Diet would be resumed without challenge.

It was in his eight years at Frankfurt, from July 1851 to March 1859, that Bismarck completed his diplomatic and political education and that the principal lines of his subsequent foreign policy took shape. The transformation that occurred in his thinking during these years was, by his own later account, the most important intellectual experience of his life. He had come to Frankfurt convinced, in conformity with the views of the conservative court party at Berlin, that the conservative alliance of Prussia and Austria was the necessary foundation of European political stability and that the proper conduct for Prussia in German affairs was the loyal subordination of her interests to those of the senior Habsburg monarchy. He left Frankfurt convinced, on the basis of his daily contact with Austrian diplomacy and his close observation of Austrian policy, that the Habsburg monarchy had no intention of treating Prussia as an equal partner in German affairs, that the maintenance of Austrian dominance over the German Confederation was incompatible with the long-term interests of Prussia, and that a confrontation between the two powers for the leadership of Germany was, in some form and at some time, ultimately inevitable.

The change of view came gradually, over the course of his first years at Frankfurt, as he observed the systematic determination of the Austrian delegate to maintain the patterns of Austrian primacy over the Diet and as he became convinced that the only proper response was a steady and uncompromising assertion of Prussian equality. He insisted, in the small daily matters of procedure that occupied much of the work of the Diet, on the equal status of the Prussian and Austrian envoys, refused to accept the various petty marks of Austrian primacy that had been customary in the pre-revolutionary period, and engaged the Austrian delegates in a long series of skirmishes over points of etiquette and procedure that, although trivial in themselves, were intended to demonstrate that Prussia could no longer be expected to accept the subordinate position of the past. The most famous of these incidents, and the one most often retold in the literature on Bismarck, was his deliberate insistence on smoking cigars at the meetings of the Diet, in defiance of the custom that only the Austrian chairman might smoke, a piece of calculated rudeness intended to make the same point in a more theatrical form. The cigar incident became a symbol of Bismarck's diplomatic style and of the new Prussian assertiveness in German affairs.

The Frankfurt years were also the period in which Bismarck developed his characteristic political doctrines of Realpolitik, the doctrine that the conduct of foreign policy ought to be governed by considerations of state interest rather than by considerations of ideological sympathy or constitutional principle. The Crimean War of 1854 to 1856 was the decisive test case for the application of this doctrine. The conservative court party at Berlin had wanted Prussia to support Austria in joining the Anglo-French alliance against Russia, on the grounds of conservative solidarity and the alliance of the three eastern monarchies. Bismarck, on the contrary, argued passionately and at length, in a long series of memoranda and letters to the Gerlach brothers and to the king, that the proper Prussian policy was to maintain the friendship of Russia at all costs, that the Austrian-Russian estrangement which the war produced offered Prussia opportunities that ought not to be sacrificed for the sake of conservative solidarity, and that the long-term interests of Prussia required her to keep her hands free in central Europe and to avoid binding alliances that would limit her future freedom of maneuver.

The arguments of these years exhibited the full force of his political intelligence and made him, by the late 1850s, one of the most controversial and most discussed figures in Prussian political life. He was at the same time admired by some conservatives for the boldness and originality of his views and distrusted by others, including ultimately by his patron Leopold von Gerlach, for the willingness to break with the conservative solidarity that had been the principal article of Prussian foreign policy since 1815. The break with Gerlach came in 1857 in a celebrated exchange of letters in which Bismarck argued that the proper criteria for Prussian foreign policy were the interests of Prussia, not the principles of legitimism, and in which Gerlach replied with the orthodox conservative defense of the principle that the alliance of the legitimate monarchies of Europe was the only secure foundation of conservative government. The exchange, which the participants intended to be private, was widely circulated in Berlin political circles and contributed materially to Bismarck's reputation as a man of dangerous and unconventional views. It also marked the end of his close personal and political alliance with the principal patron of his early career.

Ambassador to St Petersburg

In January 1859, after the breakdown of the policy of cooperation with Austria over the war in Italy and after the political reorientation of the Prussian court under the regency of Prince Wilhelm following the mental collapse of his elder brother the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Bismarck was abruptly removed from his post at Frankfurt and reassigned as Prussian ambassador to the Russian court at St Petersburg. The reassignment was, in formal terms, a promotion, since the embassy at St Petersburg was one of the most senior diplomatic posts in the Prussian service. In substance, however, it was a political demotion, designed to remove Bismarck from the central position of Frankfurt and from the daily influence over German affairs that the Frankfurt post had given him. The new regime at Berlin, under the regency of Prince Wilhelm and the liberal conservative ministry of the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, distrusted his political views and considered his presence at Frankfurt incompatible with their new policy of conciliation with Austria. He was, in the language of the diplomatic service, exiled to the Russian capital.

Bismarck arrived in St Petersburg in March 1859, was received with cordial attention by the young Tsar Alexander II, and settled into the routine of a diplomatic post that, although exalted in formal rank, was of limited political importance in comparison with what he had enjoyed at Frankfurt. He had time on his hands at the Russian court, and he used it to deepen his command of the Russian language, to study the workings of Russian society and politics at first hand, and to cultivate personal relationships with the principal figures of the Russian government that would prove of great value to him in the conduct of his later policy. The friendship he formed with Alexander Gorchakov, the Russian foreign minister, was particularly important, and would shape the management of Russo-Prussian relations through the critical years of the wars of unification.

The St Petersburg years were the most personally agreeable of his diplomatic career. He found the social atmosphere of the Russian court more congenial than the bourgeois rigidities of Frankfurt, found the high aristocratic style of Russian official life flattering to his own aristocratic sensibilities, and developed a deep personal attachment to the Russian capital and to the Russian people that would persist throughout his life. The winters were, however, severely cold, and Bismarck, who had never been hardy despite his considerable physical strength, suffered seriously from the climate. In the spring of 1860 he fell ill with what was probably an attack of pneumonia and what may have been complicated by his prodigious habits of eating, drinking, and smoking; he was bedridden for several weeks, lost a great deal of weight, and emerged from the illness with a permanent weakening of his constitution that would manifest itself in various forms throughout the rest of his life. The illness was the first serious challenge to his physical health and the beginning of the long sequence of medical troubles that would punctuate his subsequent career.

Ambassador to Paris

In May 1862, after three years at St Petersburg and after the gradual disintegration of the moderate conservative ministry at Berlin under the pressure of the rising constitutional conflict over the army reform, Bismarck was abruptly summoned back to Berlin and informed by the new king Wilhelm I, who had succeeded his elder brother in January 1861, that he was to be transferred from St Petersburg to the embassy at Paris. The transfer was, again, in formal terms a promotion, since the Paris embassy was the most prestigious of the Prussian diplomatic posts. In substance it was a stopgap measure, the king's expedient for keeping Bismarck available for higher office without yet appointing him to the prime ministership for which the king's confidants were beginning to mark him out. He arrived in Paris at the end of May 1862, presented his credentials to the emperor Napoleon III, and settled into the routine of an embassy that he himself recognized to be a temporary station pending the eventual call to Berlin that he had begun to expect.

The four months that he spent at Paris in the summer of 1862, although too short to be of any great practical importance in the diplomatic record, were of considerable importance in his own personal development. He observed at first hand the political workings of the Second French Empire, formed his own estimate of the character of Napoleon III, and acquired a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the French regime that would prove of great value to him in the conduct of his later policy toward France. His estimate of Napoleon III was a notably cold one. He regarded the French emperor as an intelligent and adroit politician but as a man of fundamentally uncertain character whose hold on power depended upon a combination of personal popularity and political manipulation that could not, in the long run, be sustained. He believed that the French regime was internally fragile and that the conduct of Prussian policy toward France could be safely guided by the assumption that French intervention in German affairs could be deflected by adroit diplomatic maneuvering. The judgment was substantially correct, and it would shape his conduct toward France throughout the next decade.

He left Paris in late September 1862 for what he expected to be a holiday in the south of France, and he was at the spa town of Biarritz in the second week of September when the telegram arrived from the king summoning him at once to Berlin. The constitutional crisis over the army reform had come to a head; the liberal majority of the Lower House had refused to vote the funds that the king required for the modernization of the Prussian army; the moderate conservative ministers had resigned; and the king, in the depths of personal depression at the political impasse, had reached the conclusion that he must either accept the parliamentary defeat and abdicate or call to office a Minister-President prepared to govern against the parliamentary majority. The man he had finally decided to summon was Otto von Bismarck. The summons that arrived at Biarritz was the call to the office that would shape the rest of his life.

The Constitutional Crisis and Appointment as Minister-President

The constitutional crisis into which Bismarck stepped on his return to Berlin in September 1862 had been building for two years and had its origins in the army reform proposed by the king Wilhelm I and the new minister of war Albrecht von Roon at the beginning of his reign. The reform, which contemplated the expansion of the Prussian standing army from one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred and twenty thousand men, the lengthening of the period of active service from two years to three, and the reorganization of the Landwehr militia in a form that would subordinate it more strictly to the regular army, was bitterly opposed by the liberal majority of the Prussian Lower House, who saw in it not only an unjustified increase in military expenditure but a deliberate strengthening of the conservative monarchical elements of the Prussian state at the expense of the bourgeois citizen-soldier traditions which the Landwehr had represented since the Wars of Liberation. The liberal majority had refused, in successive sessions of the Diet, to vote the funds for the reform, and the ministry of the Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had attempted, with diminishing success, to find a compromise that would meet the requirements of both the king and the parliamentary opposition.

By the late summer of 1862 the political position of the king had become genuinely desperate. He had refused, on a matter of constitutional principle, to abandon the army reform; the parliamentary opposition had refused, on a matter of constitutional principle, to vote the money; the moderate conservative ministers had been unable to find any way through the impasse; and the king, who was a deeply conservative man of considerable personal stubbornness, had reached the point of contemplating his own abdication in favor of his more liberal son Friedrich rather than yield the army reform to the parliamentary opposition. It was at this point that Roon, who had remained as minister of war and who had been Bismarck's principal political ally for several years, made the decisive intervention. He sent a telegram to Bismarck on the eighteenth of September 1862 with the famous laconic message: "Periculum in mora. Dépêchez-vous." (Danger in delay. Hurry.) Bismarck dropped his planned holiday, traveled overnight from Biarritz to Berlin, and presented himself to the king on the twenty-second of September.

The interview between the king and Bismarck at the palace of Babelsberg on the twenty-second of September 1862 was the founding moment of their political partnership. The king, who was in a state of acute personal distress, set out the depths of the constitutional crisis as he saw it, described the alternatives between abdication and a head-on confrontation with the parliamentary opposition, and asked Bismarck whether he was prepared to govern, if necessary, against the wishes of the parliamentary majority and to take responsibility for the army reform. Bismarck replied that he was prepared to do exactly that, that he believed the situation could be mastered, that he was ready to assume the office of Minister-President and to govern Prussia on the basis of the existing institutions without depending upon the consent of the parliamentary majority. The king, after a long and emotional conversation in which Bismarck made it clear that he would stand by the army reform and by the principle of monarchical authority over the budget, accepted Bismarck's offer of service and announced the next day his appointment as the new Minister-President of the kingdom.

The appointment of Bismarck was greeted with consternation by the liberal opposition and with considerable apprehension even by many conservatives. He had a reputation for political extremism, for personal ruthlessness, for the kind of cynicism in the use of political instruments that respectable conservatives found unsettling, and the liberal press greeted his appointment as a declaration of war on the parliamentary institutions of the kingdom. The bourgeois public of Berlin assumed, with some justification, that he had been appointed to govern on the model of the French coup d'état of 1851 by Louis Napoleon, and the prevailing expectation was that his ministry would be short, violent, and disastrous. Few observers in the autumn of 1862 imagined that they were witnessing the beginning of a tenure of office that would last, with brief interruptions, for nearly twenty-eight years and that would transform the political map of Europe.

The Blood and Iron Speech

Within days of taking office, Bismarck made his celebrated address to the budget committee of the Lower House on the thirtieth of September 1862, in which he announced what would become the most famous declaration of his political program. The setting was a routine committee meeting in which he had been invited to explain the position of the new ministry on the budget question, and the words he spoke, in what was apparently a partially improvised speech, became overnight the formal expression of the new political style that would mark his administration. "The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and majority decisions — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood," he said, in a phrase that would echo through the subsequent decades of European political history and that would attach to him, in the form "blood and iron" rather than the original "iron and blood," the most famous of his political slogans.

The phrase was meant to convey, with the calculated theatrical effect of which Bismarck was an unsurpassed master, the conviction that the unification of Germany would not be brought about by parliamentary debate and constitutional resolution, as the liberal nationalists of 1848 had imagined, but by the application of military force in pursuit of well-defined political ends. The phrase was understood at the time, however, in a quite different sense, as a declaration that Bismarck intended to govern by military force against the parliamentary opposition at Berlin rather than by constitutional means, and it produced an immediate and bitter reaction in the liberal press. The king himself, who had read the press reports of the speech while traveling by train through central Germany, was sufficiently alarmed by the public reaction that he met Bismarck at a railway station near Berlin and asked him whether the position of the ministry was tenable in the face of such hostility. Bismarck assured him that the storm would pass, that the ministry could ride out the parliamentary opposition, and that the king should not be deflected by the bourgeois clamor from the policy on which they had agreed. The king, in one of the decisive moments of the partnership between the two men, accepted Bismarck's reassurance and proceeded with him to Berlin.

The four years that followed, from the autumn of 1862 to the conclusion of the Austro-Prussian War in the summer of 1866, were the years in which Bismarck governed Prussia in defiance of the parliamentary majority of the Lower House. He continued to collect the taxes for which no budget had been voted by the parliament, on the theory of the so-called Lücke, the gap in the constitution, which held that the executive was authorized to continue the collection of established taxes in the absence of an agreement between the two houses on a new budget. He continued to spend the army funds for which no parliamentary approval had been obtained. He continued, in short, to govern Prussia in a state of more or less open constitutional conflict with the elected representatives of the Prussian people. The opposition of the liberal majority of the Lower House to his ministry was sustained throughout these years with a vigor and unanimity that would have brought down any ministry depending upon parliamentary support, but the position of Bismarck depended upon the support of the king and not upon that of the parliament, and the king's confidence in him survived all the pressures of the period.

The constitutional crisis was resolved in the end, not by the political defeat of the liberal opposition through ordinary parliamentary means, but by the diplomatic and military successes of Bismarck's foreign policy that culminated in the unification of Germany. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the establishment of the North German Confederation, and the unification of the empire transformed the political landscape so completely that the constitutional issue of 1862 lost much of its meaning, and the indemnity bill that Bismarck submitted to the parliament in September 1866 retroactively legitimated the four years of unconstitutional government in return for the parliamentary acceptance of the new political situation. The liberal opposition split in 1867 between those who accepted the new political reality and those who continued to insist on the constitutional issue, and the resulting split gave Bismarck a parliamentary majority for the establishment of the Empire and for the legislative program of the early years of the new state.

The Schleswig-Holstein Question and the Danish War of 1864

The first of the three wars of unification that Bismarck would orchestrate during his early years as Minister-President had its origins in the long-running diplomatic dispute over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the two German-speaking provinces of the Danish monarchy whose political relationship to Denmark and to the German Confederation had been a source of recurring crisis in European diplomacy since the 1840s. The duchies were a curious constitutional anomaly. Schleswig was a Danish fief with a mixed Danish and German population, while Holstein was a member state of the German Confederation with a wholly German population, and the two had been linked since the Middle Ages by personal union under the kings of Denmark. The death of the childless King Frederick VII of Denmark in November 1863 reopened the question of the succession in the duchies, since the Danish female line of succession that had been accepted in Denmark proper was disputed in Schleswig and Holstein, where the German agnatic line of the Duke of Augustenburg claimed the inheritance. The new Danish king Christian IX promptly signed a constitution incorporating Schleswig into the Danish state, in violation of the treaty arrangements that the great powers had imposed in 1852, and the German nationalist movement throughout the Confederation reacted with passionate demands for war on behalf of the disputed German rights.

Bismarck saw in this crisis the opportunity for a decisive intervention that would simultaneously satisfy German nationalist opinion, demonstrate Prussian leadership in German affairs, isolate Austria from her natural allies, and produce concrete territorial advantages for Prussia in the strategically crucial coastal region of the Baltic. His diplomatic strategy was characteristically subtle. Rather than support the popular German nationalist demand for the immediate recognition of the Augustenburg claimant, which would have aligned Prussia with the smaller German states against Austria, he insisted upon the strict letter of the treaty arrangements of 1852, demanding that Denmark adhere to the international agreements and offering, with Austria, joint military action to enforce them. The diplomatic position thus established placed the Danish government in an impossible situation, isolated Austria from the German nationalist movement that she might otherwise have led, secured the cooperation of the great powers that would otherwise have opposed Prussian intervention, and gave Prussia and Austria a free hand for the war that Bismarck had already determined to undertake.

The war that followed in the early months of 1864 was a brief and largely one-sided affair. The combined Prussian and Austrian armies invaded Schleswig on the first of February, broke through the Danish fortifications at the Düppel position in April after a brilliant Prussian assault that became celebrated as the first major triumph of the reformed Prussian army, advanced into Jutland in May, and compelled the Danish government to sue for peace in the summer. The Treaty of Vienna of October 1864 transferred the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg from Denmark to the joint sovereignty of Prussia and Austria, leaving the future political status of the duchies to be determined by subsequent negotiations between the two German powers. The military performance of the Prussian army in the war had been impressive, and the diplomatic outcome had been a clear triumph for Bismarck's strategy, but the most important consequences of the war were yet to be realized in the unfolding of the Austro-Prussian relationship over the duchies that he would soon turn to his own advantage.

The Austro-Prussian War of 1866

The disposition of the conquered duchies of Schleswig and Holstein became, in the months following the Treaty of Vienna, the central question of German politics and the principal source of the friction between Prussia and Austria that Bismarck had been carefully cultivating. The Gastein Convention of August 1865 provided a temporary arrangement under which Prussia would administer Schleswig and Austria would administer Holstein, while the formal joint sovereignty over the duchies would be maintained, but neither power found the arrangement satisfactory and both recognized that it could be only an interim solution. Bismarck used the months that followed to prepare, with the systematic attention to detail that characterized all his major diplomatic operations, the diplomatic isolation of Austria that would be necessary for the war he had now determined to provoke.

The diplomatic preparation took several forms. He secured the benevolent neutrality of France through a series of personal interviews with Napoleon III at Biarritz in October 1865, in which the French emperor was led to believe, by hints and suggestions that Bismarck was careful never to commit to writing, that French neutrality in a future Austro-Prussian conflict would be rewarded by compensations in Belgium or Luxembourg that would never in fact be granted. He secured an active alliance with Italy in April 1866, by an offensive treaty that committed Italy to attack Austria in the event of an Austro-Prussian war within three months of the signature and that promised Italy the cession of Venetia as her reward. He secured the friendly neutrality of Russia through the close personal relationships he had established at St Petersburg during his ambassadorship and through his support for Russian policy during the Polish insurrection of 1863. He secured British indifference to the German question through the systematic emphasis on the technical and procedural aspects of the dispute that gave the impression of a quarrel between German states rather than a war for the leadership of central Europe.

The military preparation for the war was equally systematic. The Prussian army of 1866 was, by general agreement of subsequent military historians, the most modern and most effective fighting force in Europe. The army reforms of the previous decade had produced a force of nearly four hundred thousand trained men, organized on the basis of universal short-term conscription with a large trained reserve, equipped with the new breech-loading needle gun whose rate of fire was several times that of the muzzle-loading rifles used by the Austrian army, commanded by the brilliant chief of the general staff Helmuth von Moltke whose strategic doctrines of mobile concentration and exploitation of railway transport would transform the conduct of modern war. The Austrian army, by contrast, was a polyglot force drawn from the various nationalities of the Habsburg empire, equipped with inferior weapons, and commanded by officers of conventional capacity whose strategic doctrines were a generation behind those of the Prussian general staff.

The war itself was provoked by Bismarck in the late spring of 1866 through a series of diplomatic moves designed to make Austria appear the aggressor and to bring the German question to a crisis that could only be resolved by military means. He proposed in April 1866 a sweeping reform of the German Confederation that would have transferred the constitution of the Confederation to a popularly elected German parliament, a proposal that he knew Austria could not accept and that placed Prussia in the unfamiliar position of being the champion of German nationalist sentiment against the Austrian-led conservative resistance. He provoked, in May and June 1866, a series of disputes over the administration of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein that culminated in the Prussian occupation of Holstein on the seventh of June. The German Confederation, on the motion of Austria, voted on the fourteenth of June to mobilize the federal army against Prussia, and Bismarck used this vote as the casus belli for the war that he had been preparing for nearly two years.

The campaign that followed was decided in the space of seven weeks. The Prussian armies invaded Hanover, Saxony, and Bohemia in the second half of June, defeated the federal forces of the smaller German states with minimal effort, and concentrated against the main Austrian army on the Bohemian plain. The decisive battle was fought at Königgrätz, or Sadowa, on the third of July 1866, on a rolling plateau north-west of the small Bohemian town of the same name, where the three Prussian armies of Moltke's plan converged upon the Austrian forces under the command of Ludwig von Benedek. The battle, which lasted from morning until evening of a single day and which involved nearly half a million soldiers on the two sides, ended in a comprehensive Prussian victory that destroyed the Austrian army as an effective fighting force, opened the road to Vienna, and decided in a single afternoon the leadership of central Europe.

The peace settlement that Bismarck negotiated in the weeks following Königgrätz was, in retrospect, one of the most statesmanlike of his career. The king Wilhelm I, who had been carried away by the magnitude of the Prussian victory, wanted to march on Vienna, annex large portions of Austrian territory, and impose upon the Habsburg monarchy a humiliating peace that would mark the visible end of her position as a great power. Bismarck, who understood that such a peace would create a permanent enemy in Vienna and would invite the intervention of the French to redress the balance of power, fought a desperate political battle within the Prussian high command and the royal entourage to compel the acceptance of a moderate peace that would leave Austria territorially intact and would secure her future cooperation with the new German state. The Peace of Prague of August 1866 imposed upon Austria no territorial losses beyond Venetia, which was ceded to Italy, but excluded her permanently from German affairs, dissolved the German Confederation, and provided for the establishment of a new federal organization of the German states north of the Main River under the leadership of Prussia. The settlement, which the king accepted only after Bismarck threatened resignation, became the political foundation upon which the unification of Germany would be completed in the following four years.

The North German Confederation

In the months following the conclusion of the war with Austria, Bismarck devoted himself to the systematic incorporation of the conquered territories and the construction of the new federal state that the peace settlement had foreshadowed. Prussia annexed outright the kingdom of Hanover, the electorate of Hesse-Cassel, the duchy of Nassau, the free city of Frankfurt, and the conquered duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, increasing her territory by nearly thirty per cent and her population by some four million inhabitants. The remaining German states north of the Main River, the kingdom of Saxony and the various smaller principalities, were brought into a new North German Confederation under Prussian leadership, with a federal constitution drawn up by Bismarck himself and ratified by the federal Diet that met at Berlin in the spring of 1867. The constitution provided for a federal parliament, the Reichstag, elected by universal manhood suffrage, alongside a federal council of state representatives, the Bundesrat, in which the Prussian government held the dominating position. The new constitution went into effect on the first of July 1867, and Bismarck assumed the position of federal chancellor in addition to his existing office as Prussian Minister-President.

The South German states of Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt remained, in the immediate aftermath of the war, outside the new federal structure, in conformity with the provisions of the Peace of Prague which had drawn the political line of demarcation along the Main River. Bismarck, however, took care to bind these states to the new North German Confederation through a series of secret offensive and defensive alliances, signed in the late summer of 1866, that committed them to place their armed forces under the command of the Prussian king in the event of war with any foreign power. He further integrated them through the renewal and extension of the Zollverein, the customs union that had bound the German states economically since the 1830s, on terms that gave the federal organs of the new Confederation a substantial role in the management of the common economic policy of the German states. The system that emerged from these arrangements was a transitional one, in which the South German states remained formally independent but were economically and militarily integrated with the new North German state to such an extent that their full political incorporation became, in the medium term, almost inevitable.

The years between 1867 and 1870 were ones of consolidation and preparation. Bismarck used the new federal institutions to lay the legislative foundations of the unified German economy and society: a common currency, a common civil code, common arrangements for the postal and telegraphic services, common rules for the conduct of commerce and finance. He cultivated the political alliances that would be necessary for the next stage of unification, particularly with the National Liberal Party that had emerged from the split in the old liberal opposition of the constitutional conflict and that constituted, in the late 1860s, the principal bourgeois political force supporting his program of national unification under Prussian leadership. He prepared the army for the further conflicts that he expected, completing the integration of the formerly hostile Hanoverian and Hessian forces into the Prussian military system and refining the staff procedures that had proved so successful in the war of 1866.

The Ems Dispatch and the Franco-Prussian War

The final stage of the unification of Germany came through the war with France in 1870 to 1871, a war that Bismarck had been carefully expecting and preparing for in the years since 1866 and that he provoked in the summer of 1870 through the celebrated manipulation of the Ems Dispatch. The immediate occasion for the war was the candidacy of the prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen for the vacant throne of Spain, a candidacy that had been proposed in the spring of 1870 and that produced, in France, a violent reaction against the prospect of a Hohenzollern monarchy on the southern frontier of France in addition to the one to the east. The French government demanded the immediate withdrawal of the candidacy, and the candidacy was duly withdrawn by Leopold himself in the second week of July 1870. The crisis would have ended at that point had the French government been willing to accept the diplomatic victory it had obtained. The French foreign minister, the Duke of Gramont, however, decided to press the matter further, demanding from the Prussian king at Bad Ems a formal undertaking that the candidacy would never be renewed.

The king received this demand from the French ambassador Vincent Benedetti on the thirteenth of July 1870 while taking the waters at Bad Ems, declined politely to give the formal undertaking that had been requested, and dispatched to Bismarck at Berlin a routine telegram describing the interview. Bismarck received the telegram in the evening of the thirteenth of July at a dinner with Moltke and Roon, read it aloud to his guests, and then proceeded, by a celebrated piece of editorial manipulation, to redact it for publication in such a way that the diplomatic exchange appeared as a confrontation between the French ambassador and the Prussian king in which both parties had behaved with a degree of provocation that no self-respecting government could overlook. The redacted version of the telegram, published in the German press on the morning of the fourteenth of July, produced in France the reaction of national outrage that Bismarck had calculated, and the French government, carried along by the popular fervor that the publication of the dispatch had inflamed, declared war on Prussia on the nineteenth of July 1870.

The war that followed was a campaign of swift and complete Prussian victory. The German armies, mobilized with the efficiency that the staff work of Moltke had perfected, crossed the French frontier on the fourth of August, defeated the French armies in a series of battles in Alsace and Lorraine, encircled the principal French army under Marshal Bazaine at Metz, and brought the second French army, accompanied by the emperor Napoleon III himself, to the catastrophic defeat at Sedan on the first and second of September 1870. The emperor surrendered with eighty thousand of his soldiers, the Second Empire collapsed at Paris on the news of the surrender, and a provisional government of national defense was established that continued the war against the invading German armies for another five months but that could not reverse the strategic decision that Sedan had imposed. Paris was besieged from the middle of September 1870; the city held out through the winter under conditions of increasing privation; and the surrender of the city in the last days of January 1871, followed by the conclusion of the preliminary peace at Versailles in February and the definitive Treaty of Frankfurt in May, brought the war to its formal conclusion.

The Proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles

The political fruit of the war was the unification of Germany that Bismarck had been preparing throughout the previous decade. The South German states, which had been bound to Prussia by the secret alliances of 1866 and which were now compelled by the patriotic enthusiasm aroused by the war with France to accept the consequences of the alliance, agreed in the autumn of 1870 to enter the new federal structure that was already in operation among the North German states. The negotiations between Bismarck and the various South German governments, conducted at Versailles during the siege of Paris in November and December 1870, produced a series of treaties that incorporated Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse-Darmstadt into a new German Empire, with the king of Prussia as the hereditary German emperor and with the existing federal structure of the North German Confederation modified to accommodate the special arrangements that had been negotiated with the South German states.

The proclamation of the new empire took place at Versailles on the eighteenth of January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors of the great palace of Louis XIV, in the presence of the assembled German princes and the senior officers of the German armies. The choice of place and date was intended to convey, with the calculated symbolism in which Bismarck was a master, the depth of the historical reversal that the new empire represented: that the German Empire was being founded not merely against the will of France but on the territory of France, in the symbolic center of the French monarchy of the seventeenth century, at the conclusion of the war that had finally destroyed the French ambition to dominate central Europe. The king Wilhelm I was proclaimed German emperor by acclamation of the assembled princes, the new imperial flag was hoisted, the Te Deum was sung, and the political map of central Europe was redrawn in the course of a single ceremony.

The unification of Germany under Prussian leadership was thus completed, in the eyes of the world and of subsequent history, on the eighteenth of January 1871. The German Empire that emerged from the wars of unification consisted of twenty-five federal states, of which Prussia was overwhelmingly the largest, with a population of nearly forty-one million, an area of more than half a million square kilometers, the most professionally trained army in Europe, and a rapidly expanding industrial economy that would within a generation make it the dominant economic power on the continent. The new state was a constitutional monarchy under the Hohenzollern dynasty, with a federal structure in which the individual states retained their internal autonomy while ceding to the federal organs the conduct of foreign affairs, the maintenance of the armed forces, and the management of the common economic policy. The federal parliament, the Reichstag, was elected by universal manhood suffrage, an unusually democratic franchise for the period; the federal council, the Bundesrat, gave to the individual state governments a continuing role in federal legislation; and the chancellor, who was both the head of the federal government and the prime minister of Prussia, exercised under the emperor a personal authority that would, in the hands of Bismarck, dominate the political life of the new empire for the following nineteen years.

Chancellor of the New Reich

The years immediately following the establishment of the Empire were ones of intense political activity, in which Bismarck constructed the institutions of the new state, established the patterns of imperial administration, and dealt with the political problems that the rapid unification of Germany had created. The most pressing of these problems was the relationship of the new state to the various ideological and confessional currents that the unification had brought together. The new Empire included some forty per cent of Catholics among its population, principally in the formerly independent states of South Germany and in the Polish-speaking eastern provinces of Prussia, and the relationship of this Catholic minority to the predominantly Protestant Prussian government became, in the early years of the Empire, one of the central political questions of the period. The First Vatican Council had proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870, an event that was widely interpreted in Protestant Germany as a declaration of Catholic intransigence in the face of the modern liberal state, and the formation of the Centre Party in 1870 as a political organization of German Catholics gave to the Catholic minority an effective parliamentary instrument that the Protestant majority found increasingly threatening.

The Kulturkampf

The political response of Bismarck to this perceived Catholic threat was the so-called Kulturkampf, the struggle of civilization, the series of legislative measures enacted between 1871 and 1875 that attempted to subordinate the Catholic Church in Germany to the authority of the state. The Kulturkampf was waged partly through Prussian legislation, partly through imperial legislation, and partly through administrative action by the Prussian Ministry of Religious Affairs under the leadership of Adalbert Falk. The principal legislative measures included the Pulpit Paragraph of 1871, which made it a criminal offense for a clergyman to discuss political affairs from the pulpit; the May Laws of 1873, which transferred the supervision of clerical education and the appointment of priests to state authorities; the law of 1874 requiring civil marriage; and the law of 1875 dissolving most of the monastic orders within the Prussian territories. The legislation was applied with rigorous severity, and by 1876 over a thousand parishes were without priests, over two hundred priests had been imprisoned, and several Catholic bishops had been deposed and either imprisoned or exiled.

The Kulturkampf was a serious political miscalculation by Bismarck and one of the principal political failures of his long chancellorship. It had been intended to break the political organization of German Catholicism and to integrate the Catholic minority more firmly into the Protestant Empire. It produced instead the opposite effect. The Centre Party, which had been a relatively new political organization in 1871, became under the pressure of the persecution a tightly disciplined parliamentary force of nearly one hundred deputies, capable of holding together the loyalty of the Catholic population through a campaign of religious persecution that strengthened rather than weakened the political identity of German Catholicism. The vote for the Centre Party in the elections of the 1870s rose steadily as the persecution intensified, and by 1878 it had become clear to Bismarck that the Kulturkampf had failed in its political objectives.

The death of Pope Pius IX in February 1878 and the succession of the more conciliatory Pope Leo XIII provided Bismarck with the diplomatic opportunity to extricate himself from the failed campaign without humiliating public retraction. Through a long series of negotiations conducted between 1878 and the early 1880s, the most rigorous provisions of the May Laws were gradually softened, the imprisoned bishops were restored to their sees, and the relationship between the German state and the Catholic Church was placed on a footing of mutual tolerance that had not existed before the Kulturkampf had been launched. The Centre Party, having demonstrated through the persecution its capacity to defend Catholic interests, emerged from the struggle as a major and stable factor in German politics, and Bismarck was compelled in the 1880s to seek its cooperation on a series of legislative measures that the National Liberals could no longer be relied upon to support.

The Bismarckian Alliance System

While the domestic politics of the new empire absorbed much of Bismarck's energy in the early years of his chancellorship, the construction of the European alliance system that would safeguard the new German state from external dangers was at least equally important to him. The principal foreign-policy problem of the new empire, as Bismarck saw it, was the management of the resentment of France over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Treaty of Frankfurt of 1871 and the consequent risk that France might seek allies among the other great powers for a war of revenge against Germany. The principal foreign-policy objective of his subsequent diplomacy was therefore the isolation of France, the maintenance of friendly relations with all the other great powers, and the construction of a system of overlapping alliances that would deter any combination of powers that might be tempted to support French revanchism.

The first major construction of his postwar diplomacy was the Three Emperors' League, the Dreikaiserbund, an informal understanding among Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia that was concluded in 1873 and that committed the three eastern monarchies to consult one another in case of disturbances of European peace. The League had no formal treaty obligations and constituted essentially an expression of conservative monarchical solidarity, but it served Bismarck's principal purpose of preventing any combination among the eastern powers against Germany and of denying to France the prospect of an alliance with either Austria-Hungary or Russia. The League functioned, with various adjustments, throughout the 1870s, and although it was strained severely by the Eastern crisis of 1875 to 1878, it provided the basic framework of conservative diplomacy on the continent during the first decade of the Empire.

The Eastern Crisis and the Congress of Berlin

The most serious test of the Bismarckian alliance system in the 1870s came during the Eastern crisis of 1875 to 1878, the long series of diplomatic and military events that began with the revolts of the Christian populations of the Ottoman Balkan provinces and that culminated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 and the diplomatic settlement at the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878. The crisis confronted Bismarck with the most difficult problem of his foreign policy: the increasingly bitter rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia over the political future of the Balkans, a rivalry that threatened to destroy the framework of the Three Emperors' League and that forced Germany to choose between her two principal allies in eastern Europe. Bismarck's response, characteristic of his political style, was to refuse the choice as long as possible and to use the position of Germany as the only power friendly to both Austria-Hungary and Russia to mediate the crisis on terms that would preserve both alliances.

The military phase of the crisis was largely Russian. The Russian armies invaded the Balkans in the summer of 1877, fought a series of difficult campaigns against the Ottoman forces around the Bulgarian fortress of Plevna, broke through the Ottoman defenses in the winter of 1877 to 1878, and advanced to within a few miles of Constantinople in the early weeks of 1878. The Treaty of San Stefano, signed in March 1878, imposed upon the Ottoman Empire a settlement that created a large Russian-protected Bulgarian state extending across the Balkans to the Aegean Sea, transferred substantial territories to the Russian-allied Christian principalities of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, and gave to Russia herself substantial territorial gains in the Caucasus and the eastern Black Sea region. The treaty was vehemently rejected by both Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, who saw in the proposed Bulgarian state a Russian satellite that would extend Russian influence to the Mediterranean, and the situation by the spring of 1878 had reached the point at which a European war over the Balkan settlement appeared imminent.

Bismarck stepped in at this point as the honest broker that the situation required. He convened in Berlin in June 1878 a great congress of the major European powers, presided over the deliberations with the personal authority that his position as the architect of the new German Empire had given him, and produced a settlement that effectively replaced the Treaty of San Stefano with a much more modest set of territorial revisions in the Balkans. The Treaty of Berlin of July 1878 reduced the proposed Bulgarian state to a much smaller principality north of the Balkan mountains, returned to Ottoman sovereignty the territories south of those mountains, gave to Austria-Hungary the right to occupy and administer the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, awarded to Great Britain the right to occupy Cyprus, and confirmed the smaller territorial gains of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania. The settlement was not entirely satisfactory to any of the parties, but it averted the immediate prospect of a European war and demonstrated the diplomatic capacity of the new Germany to mediate the disputes of her neighbors.

The Congress of Berlin marked the high point of Bismarck's prestige in European diplomacy and the public peak of his career as the arbiter of the continental order. The Russian government, however, was bitterly disappointed by the settlement, considered that it had been deprived by Bismarck of the legitimate fruits of its military victory, and emerged from the congress with a deep and lasting resentment against the German government that would shape Russo-German relations for the following decade. The deterioration of Russo-German relations that followed the Congress of Berlin compelled Bismarck to seek other diplomatic anchors for his alliance system, and it produced, in October 1879, the formal Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary that would remain the central commitment of German foreign policy until 1918.

The Dual Alliance and the Triple Alliance

The Dual Alliance of 1879 was a formal defensive treaty between the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, committing each party to the support of the other in the event of an attack by Russia and to benevolent neutrality in the event of an attack by any other power. The treaty was negotiated personally between Bismarck and the Austrian foreign minister Gyula Andrássy in the summer of 1879 and was concluded over the strong personal objections of the German emperor Wilhelm I, who had been since his youth a friend of the Russian imperial family and who considered the Dual Alliance a betrayal of the conservative monarchical solidarity that had bound the eastern courts since the Vienna settlement. Bismarck overcame the emperor's resistance by means of one of his characteristic threats of resignation, and the treaty was signed in October 1879 and entered into force at the beginning of 1880.

The Dual Alliance was the most important and most enduring diplomatic creation of Bismarck's career and the foundation of his alliance system through the rest of his chancellorship. It anchored German policy firmly to the Austro-Hungarian alliance, foreclosed the possibility of an Austro-French combination directed against Germany, and gave to Austria-Hungary the diplomatic backing she required for her own difficult position as a multinational empire surrounded by ambitious neighbors. Bismarck recognized, however, that the alliance with Austria-Hungary alone was not sufficient for the broader purposes of his diplomacy, since the maintenance of friendly relations with Russia remained essential to the isolation of France, and he therefore proceeded, in the years following the conclusion of the Dual Alliance, to construct additional treaty arrangements that would extend his system both eastward and southward.

The Three Emperors' Alliance of 1881 was a renewed formal version of the older Three Emperors' League, committing Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia to benevolent neutrality in the event of an attack by any fourth power on one of the signatories and providing for consultation among the three powers on changes to the political status quo in the Balkans. The alliance was renewed for a further three years in 1884 but became progressively unworkable as the Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans intensified, and it expired in 1887 without further renewal.

The Triple Alliance of 1882 extended the system to include Italy as a partner of Germany and Austria-Hungary, providing for mutual support in the event of attack by France upon any of the signatories. The alliance with Italy was not of great practical military value, since Italian military capacity was limited and Italian political reliability uncertain, but it had the considerable political value of denying France a potential ally in the Mediterranean and of binding the new Italian state into the conservative camp of the central European monarchies. The Triple Alliance was renewed at regular intervals throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and remained in force, in formal terms, until Italy's withdrawal from it in 1915.

The Reinsurance Treaty

The crowning piece of the Bismarckian alliance system was the so-called Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, a secret bilateral treaty between Germany and Russia that was negotiated to replace the Three Emperors' Alliance that had collapsed in that year. The treaty committed each party to benevolent neutrality in the event of an attack by a third party upon the other, with the specific exceptions that Russia was not obliged to maintain neutrality in the event of a German attack upon France and that Germany was not obliged to maintain neutrality in the event of a Russian attack upon Austria-Hungary. The treaty was therefore, on its face, a complex piece of diplomatic engineering that committed neither party to support the other in a war initiated by the other, but that guaranteed mutual neutrality in any conflict provoked by some third party. Its principal practical importance was the assurance it gave to each party that the other would not intervene against it in a conflict not of its own making, and it constituted, in effect, the diplomatic insurance against the worst possibilities of European war that the title of the treaty acknowledged.

The Reinsurance Treaty was the most controversial piece of Bismarckian diplomacy and the one that has been most extensively debated by subsequent historians. Its critics have argued that it was incompatible with the Dual Alliance of 1879, that it represented a piece of duplicitous double-dealing that could not, in the long run, have been concealed from Austria-Hungary, and that it represented an unstable diplomatic structure that could only have produced a collapse of the alliance system as soon as the contradictions between its various commitments became apparent. Its defenders have argued that it represented the only diplomatic instrument capable of preserving the friendly relations with Russia upon which the broader system depended, that the contradictions between its commitments were more apparent than real, and that the system it supported was a genuine guarantee of European peace for as long as it could be maintained. The collapse of the system after Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 has been widely interpreted as one of the principal preconditions of the diplomatic alignment that produced the First World War.

The Anti-Socialist Laws and the State Socialist Program

Alongside the construction of the European alliance system, Bismarck devoted increasing attention in the late 1870s and the 1880s to the management of the rising challenge of social democracy within the German Empire. The Social Democratic Party, founded in 1875 by the union of the older Lassallean and Eisenacher factions of the German workers' movement, had grown steadily through the 1870s as the industrial working class of the rapidly industrializing German economy became increasingly conscious of its political interests. The two attempts on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I in the spring and summer of 1878, neither of which had any clear connection with the organized socialist movement but both of which were attributed by the conservative press to the corrosive effects of socialist ideas, provided Bismarck with the political opportunity to introduce the legislative measures against social democracy that he had been contemplating for several years.

The Anti-Socialist Law of October 1878 declared illegal all organizations, meetings, and publications that pursued social-democratic, socialist, or communist aims aimed at the overthrow of the existing political and social order. The law did not prohibit the Social Democratic Party as such, since the right of socialist deputies to sit in the Reichstag was guaranteed by the imperial constitution and could not be suspended by ordinary legislation. It did, however, dissolve all the local organizations of the party, suppress its press, prohibit its public meetings, and force the party effectively underground for the twelve years that the law remained in force. The law was renewed at intervals of two or three years throughout the 1880s and was finally allowed to lapse in 1890 after Bismarck's dismissal, by which time the Social Democratic Party had not been weakened but had been strengthened by the persecution to become the largest single party in the Reichstag elections of 1890.

The Anti-Socialist Law was accompanied, however, by a parallel and arguably more important legislative program designed to address the underlying social grievances of the German working class through a comprehensive system of social insurance. The social insurance legislation of the 1880s, comprising the sickness insurance law of 1883, the accident insurance law of 1884, and the old-age and invalidity insurance law of 1889, established the foundations of the modern German welfare state and provided the world's first comprehensive system of compulsory state-organized social insurance for industrial workers. The principal political purpose of this legislation, as Bismarck himself made clear in his speeches in the Reichstag during the debates, was to demonstrate to the working class that the conservative monarchical state could provide more effective protection of working-class interests than the socialist movement that aspired to overthrow it. The legislation was bitterly opposed by both the National Liberal Party, which considered it an unwarranted state interference in the labor market, and by the Social Democratic Party, which considered it a state-capitalist substitute for the genuine socialism that the workers required. It was, in the long run, one of the most successful pieces of social legislation of the nineteenth century and one of the most enduring of Bismarck's legislative legacies.

Protective Tariffs and the Economic Turn

The legislative program of the late 1870s and the 1880s included also a major reorientation of German economic policy through the introduction of protective tariffs for agriculture and industry. The new tariff law of 1879, the so-called iron and rye tariff, imposed substantial duties on imports of agricultural products and industrial manufactures, reversing the free-trade orientation that had prevailed in Prussian and German policy since the 1860s and aligning the new Empire with the protectionist economic policies that were becoming generally prevalent in continental Europe. The tariff was the result of a political alliance between the East Elbian agrarian interests, threatened by the rising imports of cheap American grain, and the heavy industrial interests of the Ruhr region, threatened by the rising imports of British steel and manufactures.

The political consequences of the tariff legislation were as important as its economic consequences. The introduction of the tariff produced a fundamental reorganization of the political alliances on which the imperial government depended. The National Liberal Party, which had been the principal parliamentary support of the chancellor through the 1870s, split into a free-trade left wing that broke with the government and a protectionist right wing that continued to support it. The Conservative Party, which had been alienated by some of the legislation of the early 1870s, returned to political alliance with the government on the basis of agricultural protection. The Centre Party, which had recently been the principal opponent of the government over the Kulturkampf, found in the protectionist program a basis for political cooperation with the government that became permanent over the following decade. The new parliamentary configuration of the 1880s, sometimes called the cartel of the iron and rye, gave to Bismarck a working parliamentary majority that depended on a quite different coalition of social forces from the one that had supported him in the 1870s, and it confirmed the shift in his political base from the bourgeois liberal middle class to the conservative agrarian and industrial elites that would mark the rest of his chancellorship.

German Colonial Policy

The acquisition of overseas colonies, which became a major theme of German foreign policy in the middle 1880s, was a development that Bismarck embraced with reluctance and that he undertook for what were principally domestic political reasons. Throughout the early years of his chancellorship he had consistently opposed colonial adventures, considering them a distraction from the central European focus of German policy and a source of unnecessary friction with the established colonial powers, especially Great Britain. The pressure for colonial acquisitions came from a combination of nationalist sentiment, missionary enthusiasm, and commercial interest that had built up steadily through the late 1870s and that could no longer be resisted by the middle 1880s. Bismarck himself, who had been doubtful of the value of overseas colonies, was at last persuaded that the political mood of the country required action, and in the years 1884 and 1885 the German Empire acquired in rapid succession its principal colonial territories: German South West Africa, German East Africa, Cameroon, Togo, and a number of Pacific island groups including parts of New Guinea and the Marshall Islands.

The acquisition of the colonies was managed with characteristic Bismarckian skill, generally by the establishment of protectorates over territories that had been pioneered by German commercial firms and missionary societies and by the negotiation with Great Britain and the other established colonial powers of mutually acceptable boundary arrangements. The Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885, which Bismarck convened to regulate the European partition of Africa, served simultaneously to legitimize the recent German acquisitions, to establish the basic principles of European colonial expansion in Africa, and to demonstrate once again the central role of the new German state in European diplomacy. The colonial empire that the Empire acquired in these years was modest in comparison with the imperial possessions of Britain and France, but it sufficed to satisfy the immediate demands of German nationalist opinion and to give to the Empire a visible position in the imperial activities of the period.

The Death of Wilhelm I and the Three-Emperor Year

The death of the old emperor Wilhelm I on the ninth of March 1888, at the age of ninety-one, ended a personal and political partnership that had lasted for twenty-six years and that had been the foundation of Bismarck's chancellorship. Wilhelm I had been, from the time of his accession in 1861, a deeply conservative monarch of strong personal piety, simple manners, and absolute loyalty to the principle of monarchical authority, and his relationship with Bismarck had developed over the years from the initial reliance of the constitutional crisis to a mutual respect that, although never warm, had become the closest of his political relationships. He had accepted Bismarck's policies, even when they had run contrary to his personal preferences, because he had recognized in Bismarck a man of unique political capacity whose judgment he was generally willing to trust; he had given to Bismarck the continuous backing of the crown that was the indispensable basis of the chancellor's authority; and he had borne with patience the difficult moments at which Bismarck's threats of resignation and his theatrical demands for personal vindication had strained the dignity of their relationship.

The new emperor Friedrich III, who succeeded his father in March 1888, was, by his political convictions, a man of quite different views from Bismarck. He had been throughout his life a liberal in the broad sense of the term, deeply influenced by his English wife Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, and committed to a vision of constitutional monarchical government on a more parliamentary model than that which the existing imperial constitution provided. The accession of Friedrich III had been awaited for many years by the liberal opposition as the moment at which the political character of the empire might be transformed, and Bismarck himself had been preparing for some years for what he expected to be a difficult relationship with the new sovereign. The expectation was, however, rendered tragically moot by the medical situation of the new emperor. He had been diagnosed in the autumn of 1887 with cancer of the larynx, had spent the previous winter at San Remo on the Italian Riviera in a futile search for medical relief, and was already in the terminal stages of his illness at the time of his accession. He was unable, throughout his ninety-nine-day reign, to speak above a whisper, was confined for much of the period to his sick-room at Charlottenburg, and was incapable of the sustained political activity that any serious reorientation of imperial policy would have required. He died on the fifteenth of June 1888, ninety-nine days after his accession, in what came to be remembered as the year of the three emperors.

Wilhelm II and the Growing Conflict

The new emperor Wilhelm II, who succeeded his father in June 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, was a young man of considerable abilities, considerable energy, and considerable instability of temperament, whose relationship with the elderly Bismarck would become almost immediately the principal political problem of the new reign. He had been brought up under the influence of his English mother in the liberal political tradition of his father, but had reacted against that tradition during his adolescence and had developed, under the influence of his Prussian military tutors, a strongly conservative and personally autocratic conception of monarchical authority. He was determined, from the moment of his accession, to be his own man, to govern in his own right rather than through the chancellor, and to exercise personally the political powers that the imperial constitution gave to the crown.

The early months of the new reign saw a series of personal and political conflicts between the young emperor and the seventy-three-year-old chancellor that gradually destroyed the working relationship between them. The personal incompatibility of the two men was the most obvious source of difficulty. Bismarck was accustomed, after twenty-six years of service under Wilhelm I, to the deference of the crown to his political judgment, and he found it intolerable that the young emperor should attempt to overrule him on questions on which he considered his own expertise unanswerable. The young emperor was equally intolerant of what he perceived as Bismarck's personal pretensions, his treatment of the crown as an instrument of his policy, and his determination to maintain a monopoly of political influence at court. The conflicts that resulted ranged across a wide spectrum of policy questions: the renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, the policy toward the striking miners of the Ruhr in 1889, the question of the renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, the relationship between the chancellor and the various imperial ministers. By the early months of 1890 the conflict had reached the point at which one or the other of the two men would have to give way.

Dismissal from Office in March 1890

The final break came in March 1890, over a combination of issues that had been building for several months. The immediate trigger was a dispute over an antique cabinet order of 1852 regulating the access of ministers to the king of Prussia, which Bismarck had used throughout his chancellorship to prevent the imperial ministers from communicating directly with the sovereign without going through the chancellor. The young emperor, who had been finding ways around this order for some months, demanded in early March that it be formally abrogated. Bismarck refused. The further issue of the Russian alliance produced an additional area of conflict, with Bismarck arguing for the renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty that was due to expire in June 1890 and the emperor inclining, under the influence of his foreign-policy advisers, toward closer alignment with Britain and toward the abandonment of the Russian connection.

On the seventeenth of March 1890 the emperor demanded that Bismarck submit his resignation. Bismarck composed a long and characteristically pointed resignation letter, dated the eighteenth of March, in which he set out the policy disagreements that had made his continuance in office impossible and recorded for posterity his own view of the chain of events. The letter was a remarkable document of self-justification and of indirect criticism of the young emperor, and Bismarck was careful to ensure that it would eventually be made public despite the emperor's request that it be kept confidential. The resignation was accepted on the twentieth of March 1890, and the chancellorship that had lasted for nearly twenty-eight years and that had transformed the political map of Europe came to its abrupt and bitter close. The Punch cartoon "Dropping the Pilot," published shortly after the dismissal and depicting the elderly Bismarck descending the gangway of a ship while the young emperor leaned over the rail above him, became the most famous image of the end of an era and captured for European public opinion the sense that the Bismarckian system had come to its conclusion not by the natural exhaustion of its possibilities but by the impatience of a young sovereign who would prove unequal to the responsibilities he had assumed.

Retirement at Friedrichsruh

The retirement years that followed the dismissal of March 1890 lasted just over eight years, until Bismarck's death in July 1898, and they were spent principally at the estate of Friedrichsruh in the Sachsenwald forest east of Hamburg, the property that had been given to him by the emperor Wilhelm I after the unification as a personal endowment in recognition of his services. He had retreated there immediately after his dismissal, accompanied by Johanna and by his sons Herbert and Bill, and he made it the center of his retirement existence, returning regularly to his older property at Varzin in Pomerania during the summer months but spending the greater part of each year at Friedrichsruh. The estate was a substantial wooded property with several thousand acres of forest, a comfortable country house surrounded by gardens, and easy access to Berlin and Hamburg by the railway line that passed nearby; it served as the location of a continuing political court at which the former chancellor received visitors, gave interviews to journalists, dictated his memoirs, and continued through indirect channels to influence the political life of the empire from which he had been forcibly excluded.

The mood of his retirement years was one of unrelenting bitterness against the young emperor who had dismissed him and against the new chancellor Leo von Caprivi who had succeeded him. He gave to selected journalists, principally the editor Maximilian Harden of Die Zukunft and the editorial staff of the Hamburger Nachrichten, a series of interviews in which he criticized in increasingly direct terms the foreign and domestic policies of the new regime, the personal failings of the young emperor, and what he regarded as the progressive dismantling of the Bismarckian system that he had constructed. He used the platform of his retirement to publish his memoirs, the Gedanken und Erinnerungen, on which he worked steadily through the 1890s and which appeared in two volumes shortly after his death in 1898 with a third volume of more sensitive material delayed in publication for some years; the memoirs constituted his own substantial contribution to the historical record of his career and the principal source of evidence for many of the events of his chancellorship.

The Death of Johanna and Personal Decline

The most severe personal blow of the retirement years was the death of Johanna on the twenty-seventh of November 1894, after an illness of several months. She had been failing for some time, the consequences of her own declining health combined with the strain of nursing her husband through his various medical crises, and her death deprived Otto of the principal personal companion of his adult life. The mourning into which he descended after her death was extreme. He had built his entire emotional existence around her presence and her care, had depended on her counsel through every major decision of his career, and had recognized in her the one human being to whom he could speak with complete frankness about every aspect of his thoughts and feelings. Her absence left him desolate, and the visitors to Friedrichsruh in the years after her death reported finding him weeping in solitary contemplation in his study, speaking to her portrait in the dining room as if she were present, and recurring obsessively to memories of their fifty-year marriage. He visited her grave at the family mausoleum at Friedrichsruh daily during the final years of his life, and he gave instructions that his own remains should be placed beside hers when his time came.

His own physical decline was steady through the 1890s. He had been a man of prodigious physical strength and prodigious physical appetites throughout his adult life, and the conjunction of his constitution with the medical management of his various conditions by his personal physician Ernst Schweninger had kept him reasonably active well into his seventies. The pressures of his retirement, the loss of Johanna, and the natural deterioration of advanced age took their cumulative toll. He suffered increasingly from neuralgia, from the inflammation of his veins, from the heart trouble that had afflicted him in earlier years, and from a general weakness that limited his ability to walk and to receive visitors. By the spring of 1898 it had become clear to those around him that his strength was failing rapidly, and the medical bulletins from Friedrichsruh became, in the early summer of that year, an established feature of the press of Europe.

Illness and Death

The final illness began in early July 1898 with what appeared at first to be a recurrence of the long-standing trouble with his veins and his heart. The condition deteriorated steadily through the middle of July, and by the end of the month it had become clear that he was sinking rapidly. The visit of the young emperor Wilhelm II to the dying chancellor on the twenty-second of July 1898 was an awkward and tense occasion; the two men had not seen each other since the dismissal of 1890, and the formal civilities of the visit could not disguise the unresolved bitterness of their political relationship. Bismarck received his sovereign with the proper courtesies of a Prussian aristocrat but with none of the warmth that the emperor had hoped to elicit, and the conversation lasted only a short time before the chancellor's failing strength forced its conclusion. He died at Friedrichsruh on the thirtieth of July 1898, at the age of eighty-three, with his children and a few close friends at his bedside.

His funeral was conducted with the simplicity that he had himself requested. His body was buried in a granite mausoleum that he had ordered built on the grounds of Friedrichsruh, beside the body of Johanna and beside the place where his own remains would in due course be laid. The mausoleum was inscribed with the words he had selected for his own epitaph: "Otto Fürst von Bismarck, ein treuer deutscher Diener Kaiser Wilhelms I." — Otto Prince von Bismarck, a faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I. The choice of inscription was characteristic. He had been a faithful servant of the old emperor whose partnership had made his career possible; he had been a German servant in the sense that he had unified Germany and had served the German nation through the creation of its modern political form; he had been only by indirection the servant of any of the emperors who had succeeded the founder. The inscription was a quiet but pointed assertion of the relationship that had been the foundation of his career and a quiet but pointed dismissal of the relationship that had brought it to its bitter close.

Bismarck as Personality: Appearance, Habits, and Temperament

The physical Bismarck whom his contemporaries knew was an imposing presence. He was tall by the standards of his generation, well over six feet, with a heavy frame, broad shoulders, and a strong chest, and he weighed in middle age and old age considerably more than was healthy for him, his weight on occasion approaching three hundred pounds. He had a large, broad face, a ruddy complexion, blue eyes of unusual intensity, and a heavy moustache that became progressively more pronounced through his middle years; in old age, after the weight had at last been reduced by the strict regimen of Dr Schweninger, his face had become gaunt and the features more visibly defined, with the deep lines and the heavy brows that became the iconic public image of his last decades. His voice was, by all reports, surprisingly high and thin for a man of his bulk, and the contrast between his physical presence and his vocal register was one of the curiosities of his public appearances; he was, however, an effective speaker on the relatively few occasions when he addressed large audiences, and his interventions in the Reichstag were closely attended despite the unimpressive timbre of his delivery.

His habits of eating, drinking, and smoking were prodigious throughout his life, and they came near to destroying his health on several occasions before the intervention of Dr Schweninger in the late 1870s placed him on a regulated regimen that gave him the additional years of active life he otherwise would not have had. He ate enormous quantities of meat, of game, of fish, of pastries, and of every form of rich food, and he was capable, even in advanced middle age, of consuming at a single dinner what would have served as the daily ration of a much smaller man. He drank substantial quantities of wine, of beer, and of brandy throughout his adult life, and he combined a connoisseur's appreciation for the better vintages of the German and French wines with a healthy taste for the more robust spirits of the East Elbian aristocracy. He smoked cigars and pipes prodigiously throughout his life, finding in tobacco one of the principal alleviations of the strain of public office, and he was rarely seen at his country estates without a cigar in his hand. The combination of these habits with the lack of regular exercise in his later years produced a series of medical conditions — gout, neuralgia, hypertension, digestive disorders, sleeplessness — that became progressively more serious through the 1870s and that were brought under control only by Schweninger's regimen of restricted diet, controlled exercise, and regulated sleep.

His temperament was as outsized as his physical appearance. He was a man of strong and conflicting passions, capable of extraordinary intensity of feeling, of theatrical displays of emotion, of long brooding silences alternating with sudden outbursts of laughter or rage, of grandiloquent declarations of his principles followed by cold-blooded calculations of political advantage. He wept in private and in public, raged at his subordinates and at the parliamentary opposition, threatened resignation on innumerable occasions in pursuit of his political ends, and combined the histrionic instincts of a great actor with the disciplined intellect of a great statesman. He was extraordinarily sensitive to slights, real or imagined, and pursued his political enemies with a vindictiveness that scandalized even some of his political allies. He was loyal to his friends, generous to those whom he considered worthy of his support, and capable of warm personal relationships with a small circle of intimates that included Johanna, his children, his estate manager, his personal physician, and a few colleagues such as Roon and Moltke whom he treated as something approaching equals.

Political Thought: Realpolitik and the Primacy of State

The political philosophy that Bismarck embodied and that he gave to the world in the form of his practical statecraft was the doctrine that came to be known by his contemporaries as Realpolitik, the politics of reality, the conduct of public affairs on the basis of careful calculation of state interest rather than on the basis of ideological or moral principle. The doctrine was not Bismarck's invention. It had been formulated as a theoretical position by the German liberal writer Ludwig August von Rochau in his book Grundsätze der Realpolitik of 1853, and it had been anticipated by a long tradition of European political thinking running from Machiavelli through the cardinal Richelieu to the practical school of nineteenth-century diplomatic statecraft. Bismarck, however, gave to the doctrine its most celebrated practical application and became, for his contemporaries and for posterity, its most prominent personal embodiment.

The Realpolitik of Bismarck was based on a small number of central convictions. The first was that the state was the proper unit of political action and that the primary concern of the statesman was the interest of the state as he understood it. The second was that the interest of the state was to be calculated on the basis of geographical, economic, military, and demographic realities rather than on the basis of ideological or sentimental considerations. The third was that the conduct of foreign policy required the willingness to use force in the pursuit of state interest when other means were inadequate but also the recognition that force was a costly and risky instrument that ought not to be used when other means could achieve the same ends. The fourth was that the conduct of statecraft required a fundamental psychological insight into the motives and weaknesses of the men with whom the statesman had to deal, and that the manipulation of these motives and weaknesses was one of the principal arts of the political profession. The fifth was that the statesman, although he was responsible for the consequences of his actions, was not bound by the conventional moralities of private life in the conduct of state affairs, and that the willingness to act against private moralities in the service of state interest was one of the principal qualifications of political leadership.

These were not principles that Bismarck systematically articulated in any single document; they emerged from his practical conduct and from the asides of his memoirs and his correspondence, and they were elaborated by his admirers and his critics in the various political theoretical literatures that grew up around his career. They were principles that scandalized many of his contemporaries, particularly those of liberal and pietist convictions, and they continued to be controversial throughout the subsequent century of European political thought. They were also principles that proved spectacularly successful in their practical application during his career, and they constituted the foundation on which the political achievements of his chancellorship rested.

Domestic Legislative Legacy: Social Insurance and the Modern Welfare State

The most enduring of Bismarck's domestic legislative legacies was the system of social insurance that he had introduced in the 1880s and that became, in modified form, the basis of the modern German welfare state and of the welfare-state systems of much of the rest of the world in the twentieth century. The combination of compulsory sickness insurance, accident insurance, and old-age and invalidity insurance that the legislation of the 1880s had introduced provided the first comprehensive system of state-organized social protection for industrial workers anywhere in the world, and it served as the model on which a wide variety of subsequent welfare systems were constructed. The German system survived the First World War and the Weimar Republic with relatively minor modifications, was preserved in modified form through the Nazi years, was restored after the Second World War in both the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, and continues today, after more than a century of adjustments and expansions, as the foundation of the German social system. The modern American Social Security system, the British National Insurance system, and the various welfare-state systems of the Nordic countries can all be traced to the Bismarckian model of compulsory contributory social insurance, and the basic principles of the modern welfare state — the principle of state organization, the principle of contributory finance, the principle of universal coverage of the working population, the principle of categorical benefits in case of defined social risks — are all visible in the German legislation of the 1880s.

Posthumous Reputation and the Bismarck Cult

The decades immediately following Bismarck's death saw the development of a popular and political cult of his memory in Germany that took various forms over the following half century. Memorial statues of him were erected in countless German towns and cities, his birthday on the first of April was commemorated with patriotic ceremonies, the so-called Bismarck towers were built on prominent hilltops throughout the country, and biographies, memoirs, and historical studies of his career poured from the German presses in numbers that few other historical figures have inspired. The cult was politically diverse. It included a conservative monarchical strand that celebrated him as the founder of the Empire and as the defender of traditional German values; a nationalist strand that celebrated him as the architect of German unity and as the model of forceful national leadership; a liberal strand that celebrated him as the introducer of the federal constitution and of the universal manhood suffrage of the Reichstag; and a working-class strand that celebrated him as the introducer of the social insurance legislation that had protected German workers from the worst consequences of industrial change.

The reputation suffered serious damage in the period of the Third Reich, when Hitler and the National Socialist movement appropriated the memory of Bismarck for their own political purposes and presented themselves as the legitimate successors of his work of national unification. The connection that was thus established between Bismarck and the Third Reich in the popular mind was, in the considered judgment of subsequent historians, a fundamentally misleading one; Bismarck's politics had been those of a conservative aristocratic monarchist whose policy had been to consolidate the European state system, not to overthrow it, and the National Socialist program of racial extermination and continental hegemony bore no real relationship to the policies that Bismarck had pursued during his chancellorship. The discrediting of the Bismarck cult during the years of denazification after the Second World War was therefore based on a fundamentally erroneous historical interpretation, and the rehabilitation of Bismarck as a serious historical figure that has taken place in the German historiography of the postwar decades has had to work against the lingering identification of him with the political tradition that had appropriated his memory in the 1930s and 1940s.

Historiographical Debates

The historical interpretation of Bismarck has been the subject of more controversy in modern German historiography than the interpretation of any other figure of the nineteenth century, and the debates around his career have been among the central political-historical debates of the twentieth-century German historical profession. The principal points of controversy have concerned the question of whether his policies were a genuine response to the historical conditions of his time or whether they reflected the personal ambitions of an exceptional individual; the question of whether the constitutional structure of the empire he created was an adequate basis for the modernization of German political life or whether it contained the seeds of the subsequent failures of German constitutional government; the question of whether his alliance system was a genuine guarantee of European peace or whether it represented an inherently unstable arrangement that necessarily produced the diplomatic alignment of the First World War; and the question of whether his domestic policies were the consolidation of an outdated conservative social order or the foundation of the modernizing welfare state of the twentieth century. The principal participants in these debates have included, on the side of a generally critical interpretation, the great historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Heinrich August Winkler of the school of social and structural history that emerged in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s; on the side of a more sympathetic interpretation, historians such as Lothar Gall and Otto Pflanze whose extensive biographical studies of Bismarck have attempted to reconstruct his career in its full historical complexity; and, on the side of various more particular interpretations, a wide range of specialist scholars whose work has addressed specific aspects of his diplomatic, parliamentary, and legislative activity.

Influence on Twentieth-Century Statecraft

The influence of Bismarck on twentieth-century statecraft has extended well beyond the immediate German context in which his career was conducted. He has been studied as a model of strategic statecraft by political and military leaders in many countries; the principles of his diplomatic style have informed the practice of statesmen as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and various leaders of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian state; and the system of compulsory social insurance that he introduced in the 1880s has been imitated, in various forms, by virtually every industrialized nation. The combination of conservative political principles with modernizing social and economic policy that characterized his domestic program has been treated as a model by various twentieth-century conservative reformers, and the careful management of the relationship between domestic political pressures and foreign-policy commitments that characterized his statecraft has been studied as a paradigm of integrated political leadership. He has been, in short, one of the most influential of nineteenth-century European statesmen on the conduct of public affairs in the period that has followed him, and the principles of his statecraft, although applied in radically different circumstances, have continued to be a reference point in the political education of subsequent generations of leaders.

Conclusion: the Meaning of Otto Von Bismarck

It remains, at the end of this long account of his life, to try to render some final estimate of the significance of his career and of the meaning of his person. He was, in the simplest summary, the architect of the unified German state that has continued, with various interruptions and transformations, to dominate the politics of central Europe from the proclamation of 1871 to the present day. He was the most successful European statesman of the second half of the nineteenth century, the man who reordered the political map of Europe by a deliberate program of state policy and who maintained the resulting order through nearly two decades of skilled diplomatic management. He was the founder of the modern welfare state through his social insurance legislation, the architect of the modern conservative-bureaucratic tradition in German political life, and the principal model of integrated statecraft in modern European history. He was, in all of these aspects of his career, a figure of the first rank, and his place in the history of European political life is secure regardless of how the more controversial features of his career may be evaluated by subsequent generations.

He was also, as a human being, a man of extraordinary complexity, of sharp and sometimes terrifying intensity, of broad cultural cultivation, and of devoted personal attachment to the small circle of family and friends on whom his emotional life depended. He combined the practical instincts of a country squire with the intellectual sophistication of a man who had read widely in European literature and philosophy. He combined a deep and apparently sincere religious faith with a willingness to act against the conventional moralities of his faith in the service of his political ends. He combined a fierce personal pride and ambition with a steady recognition that his career depended upon the favor of the sovereigns he served. He combined a conservative attachment to the traditional institutions of the Prussian state with a far-sighted recognition of the necessity of modernizing those institutions if they were to survive the transformations of the industrial age. He was, in short, a figure of remarkable internal complexity, in whom the central tensions of nineteenth-century European political life — between tradition and modernization, between conservative principle and practical adjustment, between national passion and continental statesmanship, between the personal will of the great man and the impersonal forces of historical change — were embodied in a single personality of unusual intensity and unusual capacity.

The world that he left behind him at his death in 1898 was different from the world he had entered at his birth in 1815 in ways that were directly attributable, in many particulars, to his personal political action. Germany was unified, the European state system had been reorganized, the welfare state had been founded, the modern conservative tradition had been established, the patterns of modern integrated statecraft had been demonstrated. The Europe that came after him — the Europe of the years 1898 to 1914, of the First World War, of the interwar years, of the Second World War, of the postwar settlement, of the European integration of the second half of the twentieth century — was a Europe whose political structures were the legacy, for better and for worse, of the work he had done in the decades from 1862 to 1890. He had been, by any honest measure, one of the most consequential political figures of the modern era, and the studies that subsequent generations have devoted to his career are a continuing testament to the magnitude of his historical influence and the depth of the questions that his career has raised about the proper conduct of political life in the modern age.