Bismarck, the Iron Contradiction
‘An invented crown of dirt and clay!’
So cried King Frederick William IV of Prussia, calling all his rhetorical wrath down on the presumption and insolence of the National Assembly. How dare they offer him the crown of Germany? How could they give it to him, he lambasted, if it was not theirs to give? Frederick William had sense enough to decline politely on the second asking, but he wrote to his sister (the Tsarina) that a ‘man-donkey-dog-pig-and-cat delegation’ had made the request. I think his feelings are fairly clear.
Who rules? This was 1848 and two answers to that question were in the air: monarchs or the people. Frederick William, scion of the ancient House of Hohenzollern, said the former. The National Assembly, founded on a wave of popular revolution, said the latter. Both are surprisingly difficult concepts, both to philosophise about and to realise in reality. The 19th century would discover that, to much blood and woe.
The fault lines were not always so obvious as in 1848, but the question was never really resolved. It played no small part in the perpetual constitutional crisis of the Germanies up until it all came down in 1918.
And yet when we think of the era, our imagination is dominated by a man who was neither monarch nor liberal. Otto von Bismarck was truly larger than life. He was about 6’4”. His appetite was legendary. He turned cigar smoking into a competitive sport. In his University days, by some accounts, he fought twenty six duels at University. As he grew in maturity, so his moustache grew in size. He needed all that girth, all that persona, to contain the multitudes within him. For Bismarck, perhaps unique in all Europe, tried to resolve that fundamental contradiction of the age, both in his policy, and in himself.
Liberty vs Liberties
You can’t see the tension between liberal nationalism and the forces of conservatism more clearly than in the thirty-nine states and statelets of Germany. (Sorry Italy.) In the wake of Napoleon, the grandees of Austria and Prussia picked up the shattered fragments of the Holy Roman Empire and glued them into an ugly substitute called the German Confederation.
Yes, I said liberal nationalism. We tend to think of nationalism as a right-wing phenomenon these days but, back in the mid-1800s, it was almost exclusively a liberal cause. To understand this, let’s go back a bit further.
The idea of Prussia is an early modern one. Bismarck was born into a dynastic Kingdom with wildly scattered holdings. The House of Hohenzollern was the hub of a wheel. Springing off it were many spokes: Brandenburg, a slice of the flatlands in the far north east of German-speaking Europe; Jülich and Kleve, a chunk of the fabulously wealthy Rhineland on the borders of France; Ducal Prussia, a wedge way out in the eastern Baltic. Germans certainly predominated but there were plenty of Poles, Lithuanians and many more in the mix. While the geographical dispersal mattered strategically — Prussian Kings were always trying to link their realm up — that the various bits had no identity in common was little problem for the Kingdom’s legitimacy. Each individual ‘spoke’ didn’t care what was happening in the other ones. They gave their loyalty to the crown at the hub and in return expected it would respect their particular local rights and privileges. The Hohenzollern dynasty were literal landlords. If the tenants found the rent reasonable and there weren’t too many inspections, why complain?
Napoleon changed all that. No longer were the Germans a pie, where everyone cared about their own slice, but a stew, hopelessly intermingled. Now we are all citizens together, we should be a unified state, beneath one, national representative: a German Emperor. Nationalism was a democratic, homogenising force.
Of course, not everyone agreed. It was a long and hard road for those heated liberals to persuade the mass of people to give up their own special liberties and embrace the dangerous idea of universal Liberty. The conservatives (i.e. those who conserve) sought to defend the world of little crowns and little, distinctive communities. They tried to put a lid on the stew.
In 1848, the pan boiled over. Revolutionaries rose to sweep away the petty autocrats and the local privileges. They call it the year of revolutions, with upheavals in Vienna to marches in London to flown-blown state overthrow in Paris, and, of course, the uprising in cold, pancake-flat Berlin. Here King Frederick William was made a prisoner in his palace and an elected National Assembly met in Frankfurt.
At length the Berlin revolutionaries died on the barricades and, a little later, Frederick William refused the crown offered by the National Assembly. The revolution lived fast and died young. Nationalism was more patient.
In which Bismarck has a plan. Sort of
Fast-forward to 1862. The new King, William, saw himself as a bluff old soldier. He naturally sought to expand and lengthen the terms of service of Prussia’s pride: the army. However, one of the legacies of 1848 was the Landtag, the Prussian Parliament, and they were in no mood to approve the King’s request without some serious expansions to their oversight of the armed forces. William could never accept such a thing. So it was that he appointed Otto von Bismarck.
Who? A man of a subtle, opportunistic and, at the end, deeply contradictory nature. A man who wrote ‘if I am to proceed through life on the basis of principles, it were as if I were to walk down a narrow path in the woods holding a long pole in my mouth.’ This certainly implies a kind of amoral manipulator, but the story is deeper. He did hold ideals. Bismarck was always committed to the monarchy and the power of the Prussian state. The complication? You can’t protect and nurture these things without moving with the times: ‘you have to listen to the rustle of God’s cloak as he passes through history, and seize the hem as he goes by’.
God’s march meant German unification was inevitable. It was a current to be steered with, not to futilely paddle against. The only option was to pursue, flexibly and doggedly, a German Empire that preserved Prussian power. It was a strategy that combined nationalism, in the former, and conservatism, in the latter. His whole approach was an wobbly bridge between the two great, opposing social forces.
Now, at the time of his appointment, one could be forgiven for not seeing any subtlety. Effectiveness, yes. After a failed compromise he simply exploited an ambiguity in the constitution. If the Landtag would not approve a budget for 1862, he’d just use the one for 1861. Indefinitely.
A glorious triumph of minister and monarch. But even here we can see a contradiction: a contradictory strategy made for a contradictory relationship. In fact, William had recalled Bismarck from St. Petersburg — i.e. far, far away — where he’d put the ‘petulant child’ to snub hum.We’ve seen that things warmed after Bismarck’s success, but, while they shared the same aims, William never understood his chief servant. He simply couldn’t grasp that you can achieve conservative ends with liberal means. Bismarck, on the other hand, liked to present himself as a loyal and dutiful servant of the King, even while pressuring and threatening and manipulating that very same King into doing what he — Bismarck — wanted. He even said that civil servants are like musicians in an orchestra who have to play together, and he wanted to make his own music. Pretty much sums it up. The two remained bound together, each absolutely necessary for the other, all the while incessantly shouting and sulking at each other.
The Smoothie Wars
One of the fascinating aspects of nineteenth century politics is how wars over crowns and successions mix up into popular nationalism. The former is very old, the latter very new. It was in this context that Bismarck walked a winding road to an incomplete destination.
That’s why I think of the wars Bismarck fought to create Germany as smoothies. Crises of succession sparked two. One was even over the Spanish throne. It recalls Louis XIV, Marlborough, and a whole cast of magnificently bewigged characters from a century and a half earlier. But this play was set in the era of rifles and railways and, most importantly, mass, popular, national feeling. Thrones and the families who sit on them remained vitally important to war and peace. The difference was now that they were blended up, like a smoothie, in the great social forces of the day. Bismarck’s genius — part of it — was knowing what ingredients would blend up into something worth drinking. Let’s consider them in order.
The Danish War was made of succession and national territory. We don’t have weeks to describe the background of the marvellously arcane Schleswig-Holstein crisis where everyone is called Frederick, Christian, or Frederick Christian — perhaps that’s for another blog post. To oversimplify, Bismarck wooed Austria into a joint action against the Danes over their attempts to subsume the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein into a centralised Danish Kingdom. Now, the Holstein section had a substantial German population and had long been associated with the Holy Roman Empire and its successor Confederacy. A short, bloody action saw Schleswig-Holstein overrun and the administration shared between Austria and Prussia.
When we left Bismarck, he was sucking up to the King with some neat legal tricks. This made him few enough friends. Minister-President of Prussia wasn’t a job often held for long, so you’d be safe to assume his many enemies would force him sooner rather than later. Our strange little war over a little bit of land changed all that.
Bismarck’s hated ministry transformed overnight. The territory was nice, but the popularity was nicer. He’d outflanked the liberals in the Landtag entirely. How could they any longer justify withholding funds from the glorious, victorious Prussian army? How could any red-blooded German nationalist not toast Bismarck’s victory? No longer was he the archetypal conservative despot, weighing down the liberal cause with weights of steel, but a national hero.
So much for the Danes. His next move was against the Austrians. Here we have great power rivalry and the leadership of a national cause bound up together. With joint custody of Schleswig-Holstein, that stubborn child, Bismarck had laid a trap for the Austrians. All he had to do is leap on the slightest irregularity in their joint administration to provoke a war. And, within two years, that’s exactly what he did.
But why? Prussia and Austria were among history’s greatest frenemies. They needed each other to keep the liberals down. After all, Austria was even more quintessentially the dynastic state than Prussia. It was its own smoothie of countless mingling nationalities who dwelled in the collection of lands owned by the Habsburg family. No wonder they had spearheaded the conservative reaction after the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, Prussia and Austria were the two biggest fish, by far, in the German pond. They each had to stop the other from gaining dominance. Austria never let its gaze stray. They used every diplomatic method in the book to keep the German states from falling under Prussia’s sway.
If there was going to be a Germany, Bismarck realised, it was going to be too small for the two of them. Prussia must take the reins of the German people in order to reign over Germany. That road led through Vienna. It’s also why he had to plot to get Vienna to declare war. Prussia couldn’t give up the moral high ground in a question of leadership. Another startlingly quick victory later and Prussia had hegemony over all but the southernmost German states.
Only France now stood in the way. Here we blend up yet another war of succession, the question of German unity, and the age old contest over France’s dominance of Europe. To cut a long story slightly shorter, Bismarck pulled yet another diabolically cunning scheme. He presented to the press a conversation between his King and the French Ambassador with some words omitted. It was so artful as to be entirely truthful while escalating a reasonably polite conversation into vehement insults between one sovereign and another. France’s Emperor — Napoleon III, the big guy’s nephew — was apoplectic. War was inevitable.
Prussia’s victory was not, but luckily for Bismarck it was another swift and decisive victory. France recognised William as German Emperor. Those southern states had no choice but accept their incorporation into the empire. At last, Germany had arrived.
We can say with all the decisiveness of the cavalry charge against the French guns at Mars-la-Tour, though, that it reveals certain contradictions in his legacy. From his unquiet retirement, Bismarck would always present himself as the square-jawed man of action, of force, decisiveness, with no time for petty politics. Yet we see at every stage just how manipulative, opportunistic, and deceitful he could be. He might bang on about the ‘blood and iron speech’ he made to the Landtag way back before the Danish war, but we see a far more interesting reality beneath.
Frankenstein’s Empire
Unsurprisingly, the bizarre conflicts of the 19th century and the man of many facets who engineered them created a creature of inconsistencies. The new German Empire was, from the beginning, laid out as a league of princes beneath a uniting figurehead, the Emperor. A much closer union than before, certainly. Still an awkward compromise between central power and autonomous component pieces.
It didn’t embody liberal nationalist dreams. In this model, little autocrats kept little thrones. This was no flat terrain where all had equal laws and equal representation and a single, German identity. The topography of law and belonging remained rocky, gruelling. Bismarck had stitched many parts together and brought them to life, but the result was neither sleek nor elegant. Neat maps where it’s all one block colour can lie like that.
Bismarck was the man to hold a contradictory Empire together. His plans didn’t always go his way, yet even when they produced unexpected outcomes that frustrated and appalled him, they tended to bind the Empire closer rather than tear it apart.
Let’s consider universal suffrage to the Imperial Reichstag. The Prussian Landtag remained a highly undemocratic entity, dominated by the nobility, but Bismarck knew that the only way he could outflank the liberals on the national level was to escalate. Don’t extend the franchise to more middle-class burghers like they wanted. Go further. Extend it to every man in Germany.
It worked all too well. He was right that the masses didn’t vote liberal. But they didn’t vote conservative either. The social democratic movement in Germany was probably the largest in Europe by the late 19th century. Bismarck had unleashed a political force he didn’t understand, never mind knew how to address. Yet, in doing so, he had firmly linked the reds to the democratic process.
Lenin famously argued with Karl Kautsky over whether a small group of professional revolutionaries should seize power by force or if a mass, popular movement should pursue reform within the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kautsky was a German.
The legacy among Catholics is ambiguous too. Bismarck had a paranoid, irrational fear of Catholicism, a kind of fifth column (appropriate metaphor) within his state that owed allegiance not to Fatherland but to Pope. The southern German states were predominantly Catholic, as was Austria, as was France, as were the vast majority of the Poles. He cracked down hard.
On the one hand, this was clearly foolish. He drove the Poles into the arms of Polish nationalism with his religious and educational policy. The protestant Masurian Poles and the poor old Lithuanians, who were neither Catholic nor Polish, were caught in the net. Bismarck’s German project had always been associated with the protestant north. His policies did not help bridge the gap with the Catholic south. Within the Reichstag they organised into a single, powerful party with Catholic priorities rather than shattering into ideological camps.
It’s also worth making the point, though, that he backed the Catholics into a corner. They hated him, but they had to defend and define themselves in his terms. In the terms of loyalty to Germany. The Catholic party ended up a feature, not a bug, of German politics — right up until the Nazis.
Colossus
Some say that one of the reasons for the outbreak of the First World War was the quality of the leaders. Or, pointedly, the lack thereof. They say that the men (always men) of power were mediocre, small-minded, and petty compared to their great Victorian forebears, mighty visionaries who bestrode the world. I find this fairly unconvincing in the main. For one thing there are all the many structural causes, paths fixed for those lesser men by their greater sires. Then there are the distinctly dubious characters of the era gone by. Consider the wannabe Napoleon III and the incomparably dull Franz Josef.
Still, it’s hard to deny in one, big, moustachioed way. Bismarck was huge, Bismarck stood across a vast abyss, with one foot in nationalism and another in conservatism. It’s hard to overstate how amazing it was that he even thought to do this, never mind achieve it. In doing so he bound the straining seams of a new nation with panache, if not grace. Take him away and it’s easy to see how all the cracks might open up wide.
Lest we succumb to hero worship, we ought not only to consider his failures, his fudges, his overreactions and his repressions, but also his legacy. It is not too much to say that Bismarck had a major part to play in entrenching nationalism as a right-wing phenomenon. He brought the authoritarian state and national feeling together. Nationalism became, and remains, a predominantly establishment ideology. It is far less fair to lay Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s folly or the horrors of the Nazis at his door, as some have tried. Let us say, instead, that he had the dubious honour of creating a world he would not have recognised.
