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.