Man of iron

BIOGRAPHY: ROBERT GERWARTHreviews Bismarck: A LifeBy Jonathan Steinberg Oxford University Press, 537pp. £25

FEW STATESMEN in modern history have had a more profound impact on European politics than the founder of the German nation state, Otto von Bismarck. As German chancellor between 1871 and 1890 Bismarck established the previously fragmented German Empire as the dominant economic and political power on the European continent.

In the field of domestic politics he was far less cohesive: by persecuting the socialists and the Catholic Centre Party in the 1870s and 1880s he left a legacy of bitterness among those he sought to destroy. Loathed by the political left and venerated by conservatives, Bismarck has remained a controversial and divisive historical figure ever since.

Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography of the Iron Chancellor – the first to appear in more than 20 years – is set to renew the controversy over Bismarck and his political legacies. As Steinberg makes clear from the start, he finds the subject of his well-written book both repulsive and fascinating – a judgment shared by many of Bismarck’s contemporaries.

Unlike Bismarck’s previous biographers, Steinberg is less concerned with the historical events and social structures that shaped his subject’s life than with how a person as unpleasant as Bismarck came to dominate German politics more totally than anyone before or since Hitler.

Born in 1815, the year the Congress of Vienna reordered the war-torn continent after the fall of Napoleon, Bismarck was in many ways an unlikely candidate to play a prominent role in international politics. A rural aristocrat with a reputation for outrageously undiplomatic statements, reactionary views and a dissolute lifestyle, he nonetheless possessed several talents that marked him out, combining an enormous self-confidence with a rare rhetorical skill that even his bitterest opponents had to acknowledge. But his genius had a darker side, too: a deep-rooted urge to dominate his fellow human beings at any cost and a ruthless determination to achieve his ambitious political objectives.

When, for example, in June 1862, Bismarck visited London he astonished his listeners at a reception also attended by the Austrian ambassador and the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli with a blunt statement outlining his plans for Europe’s future: “As soon as the army has been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.” Disraeli was taken aback by such an impudent statement and warned the Austrian ambassador: “Take care of that man; he means what he says.”

Nine years later, after the crushing defeats of Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870-1) at the hands of the Prussian army, Bismarck had accomplished even more than he had promised his audience in London. He had created the largest and most powerful nation state on the European continent and had significantly altered the balance of power in Europe for decades to come.

How could a man like Bismarck achieve so much? As Steinberg makes clear in his engaging biography, the secret of his power lay in his ability to control his royal master, the Prussian king and first German emperor, Wilhelm I. Wilhelm repeatedly complained that it was “hard to be emperor under Bismarck” but always gave in to his chancellor’s wishes. Wilhelm did not die until 1888, when he was 91, and that longevity gave Bismarck 26 years in high office, 19 of them as German chancellor. Indeed, it was only after Wilhelm’s death that the Iron Chancellor’s star began to decline.

According to the 1871 constitution that he had himself designed, Bismarck’s constitutional role depended not on a parliamentary majority but on the German emperor’s right to appoint and dismiss the head of government. This constitutional design, which had served Bismarck well while Wilhelm I was alive, began to work against him when young Wilhelm II acceded to the throne in 1888. The new emperor wanted to enjoy “personal rule”, and in 1890 he decided that it was time to rid himself of Bismarck.

Retiring to his vast country estate near Hamburg, Bismarck embarked on a personal path of revenge against Wilhelm II, whose incompetence quickly turned Bismarck into a national-hero figure. Through a number of anonymously published newspaper articles, he leaked embarrassing state secrets and criticised Wilhelm II as a fool under the spell of vain advisers who would ruin Germany and the ruling house of Hohenzollern.

In some ways Bismarck was right: by 1914 imperial Germany had manoeuvred itself into a position of total international isolation, and the subsequent world war led to defeat and revolution. Yet, as Steinberg argues, many of the deep-rooted problems that later came to haunt Germany and the rest of the world in the 20th century – authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and an inclination to resolve international political issues through violence – began not with the Great War but with Bismarck himself.

It is here, on the longer-term implications of Bismarck’s rule, that not every reader will agree. Steinberg’s critical assessment of Bismarck’s legacies tends to ignore some of the striking contradictions inherent in Bismarck’s Reich. Imperial Germany was hardly a democratic state in a modern sense, but it was not a dictatorship either. It is also disputable whether German anti-Semitism in the late 19th century was more pronounced than it was in eastern Europe or, indeed, in France, and it remains an open question whether any anti-Semitic party would have gained more than a few seats in the Reichstag without the military defeat of 1918 and the Great Depression in 1929.

This criticism notwithstanding, Steinberg has written a fine biography that offers all that makes this genre so popular. With a judicious eye for anecdotes and previously untapped personal sources, he does an expert job in telling the life story of one of the most fascinating political figures of the 19th century.

Robert Gerwarth is director of UCD's Centre for War Studies (ucd.ie/warstudies). His book The Bismarck Mythis published by Oxford University Press