Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg – review by David Blackbourn

Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg

– review by David Blackbourn

Bismarck, 'a man of appetites', makes for a compelling biography

Otto von Bismarck became minister-president of Prussia in September 1862. His appointment was a desperate roll of the dice by King Wilhelm I, who faced constitutional crisis when parliament rejected a bill that increased the length of military service and reduced the role of the civilian reserve. After contemplating abdication, the king instead summoned the 47-year-old Junker, a man reviled by liberals because of his violently reactionary statements, yet deeply distrusted by orthodox conservatives as an unprincipled political schemer. Jonathan Steinberg's readable new biography  quotes a Prussian diplomat, Councillor von Zschock in Stuttgart, who wrote that Bismarck's very name caused "profound hatred in the depth of the soul of every true friend of Prussia". Few thought he would last long; some believed he had been appointed only to provoke a reaction that would open the way to military dictatorship.

Nine years and three wars later Austria had been excluded from German affairs, France defeated and a Prussian-dominated German nation state established with Wilhelm I as its emperor. The liberals who still denounced Bismarck on the eve of Prussian victory over Austria in 1866 now celebrated his political genius. They passed an indemnity bill that retrospectively sanctioned Bismarck's earlier breaches of the constitution. Lothar Gall's outstanding biography 30 years ago called Bismarck a "white revolutionary", who placed himself at the head of nationalist sentiment, destroyed the German confederation and subverted the international order to preserve the fundamentals of the Prussian monarchical state. Like Lampedusa's Tancredi in The Leopard, Bismarck took the view that "for things to remain the same, everything must change". In his own words, if there was to be revolution, better to make it than to suffer it.

He remained in power for another 20 years, increasingly irascible and dictatorial, denouncing political opponents and sulking on his estate when things became too much. The problems were partly of Bismarck's making. The hybrid political system created in 1871, in which he served as both Prussian minister-president and chancellor of the new German empire, required a difficult balancing act. It was harder still because Bismarck, making a wager on popular conservatism like his contemporaries Louis Napoleon and Benjamin Disraeli, introduced universal manhood suffrage for German national elections. This ended up benefiting opposition parties. The persecution of the Catholic church in the 1870s and of Social Democrats in the 1880s also backfired. Bismarck ran through his whole bag of tricks in these years – repression, the politics of divide-and-rule, patchwork coalitions, appeals to national security. Then Wilhelm I and his successor Friedrich II both died in 1888, bringing Wilhelm II to the throne. Mounting political conflicts and a battle of wills with the kaiser led to Bismarck's dismissal in 1890. He retreated for the last time to Friedrichsruh. But the rest was far from silence. In the years before his death in 1898, while the Bismarck legend was being created, he wrote his mendacious, score-settling memoirs and relished his role as unofficial leader of the disloyal opposition.

Steinberg takes the reader expertly through the life of this outsized figure, starting with the unhappy child caught between a weak father and a cold mother ("as a small child I hated her, later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods"), and ending with the raging, vindictive old man. The early and middle reaches of the life are beautifully managed. We meet the rackety student who clashed with university authorities in Göttingen, the bored bureaucrat who left the civil service to run a family estate and was known among fellow squires as the "Mad Junker", the lover who had a string of broken affairs (not least with English women) before marrying pious Johanna von Puttkamer on the rebound, and the political tyro who finally found an object worthy of his gargantuan energies. Bismarck first entered politics in 1847 and became the darling of conservatives after his hard-line stance during the 1848 revolution. He then spent the 1850s, when he was a Prussian diplomat, gradually distancing himself from straightforwardly conservative views as he developed the "monstrous maxims and savage expressions" (Crown Prince Friedrich) that horrified early patrons like the brothers Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach.

Bismarck was a man of appetites, for food, drink and tobacco as well as political power. Even his chamber pots were enormous, a fact solemnly recorded by the nationalist historian Heinrich von Sybel as a sign of greatness. Steinberg has an eye for details like this and a talent for reconstructing the political drama of the period. He sets Bismarck within a richly drawn world of interrelated Prussian nobles, the Kleists and Manteuffels who turn up again and again in the book and give it the texture – even some of the affectionate tolerance – of a Theodor Fontane novel. Steinberg has some interesting accounts of the political process, both in parliament and behind the scenes (although, oddly, the landmark social insurance legislation and Germany's acquisition of colonies in the 1880s both receive perfunctory treatment). There is a fine account of Bismarck's relationship with Wilhelm I, the most important in his political life. Steinberg also has sparkling vignettes of secondary figures such as Bismarck's close friend from student days, the American historian John Lothrop Motley, who wrote a novel featuring a thinly-disguised "Otto von Rabenmarck", and Albrecht von Roon, the general and war minister who first met the 19-year-old Bismarck in 1834, helped to put him into power nearly 30 years later, and remained loyal for the rest of his life despite many provocations.

Steinberg paints an all too believable picture of Bismarck's "volcanic temperament" and brings out the contradictory qualities of a man who was both cruel and sentimental, capable of devoting immense and deliberate effort to destroying the career of Harry von Arnim yet inconsolable over the death of his dog Sultan. The contradictions run through his writings, which contain both subtle wit (especially in younger years) and coarse abuse. One is sometimes reminded, in fact, of Bismarck's contemporary, Karl Marx, with whom he shared a commitment to sarcasm as a political weapon and a taste for the same authors (Shakespeare, Chamisso, Heine). Steinberg, I think, seriously overstates Bismarck's indifference to literature, both classical and modern. He is, on the other hand, wonderfully good on Bismarck's illnesses, real and imagined. On the evidence of this book, Bismarck was one of the great hypochondriacs. As Steinberg puts it, "no statesman of the 19th or 20th century fell ill so frequently, so publicly, and so dramatically as Otto von Bismarck".

Bismarck's illnesses and hypochondria, like his rages and bouts of insomnia, represent for Steinberg the pathology of power. The central thesis of the biography is that Bismarck's singular genius lay in the exercise of his "sovereign will". Bismarck consumed himself in its exercise, and opposition literally made him ill. Like Lothar Gall a generation ago, Steinberg sees that Bismarck had no obvious power base, whether as courtier, bureaucrat or party leader. This led Gall to describe Bismarck as an early exemplar of the modern professional politician, the pure political animal. It leads Steinberg to argue that Bismarck's power lay ultimately in personal magnetism, in his ability to enchant and bind others. I mean it as a compliment when I say that Steinberg makes this case more plausible than I would have thought possible. In doing so he gives readers perhaps the greatest single pleasure of this book, and its signature quality – the unusually generous helping of quotations from those who came under Bismarck's spell. In the end, though, I think Steinberg plays down too much the political institutions and social movements, what Von Roon once called the "parallelogram of forces", within and through which Bismarck moved.

There is occasional hyperbole (Bismarck was "the most famous statesman of his or perhaps any age"), but this is an astute and thoughtful book. The events described in its central chapters, which led to German unification, were part of a larger recasting of global power relations in the 1860s. Steinberg has given us a major biography of the figure who placed his stamp on those events. This is the best one-volume life of Bismarck in English, much superior to older works by Alan Palmer and Edward Crankshaw. It brings us close to this galvanic, contradictory and ultimately self-destructive figure.

David Blackbourn's The Conquest Of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany is published by Pimlico.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/19/bismarck-life-jonathan-steinberg-review