Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck

Otto Eduard Leopold Fürst von Bismarck, Herzog von Lauenburg, Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen (April 1, 1815 – July 30, 1898) was a Prussian politician who was the principal architect of the unification of Germany, of which he served as the first chancellor.

Bismarck was born to a Prussian junker family in Schönhausen, just east of the Elbe in Brandenburg. The Bismarck family was ancient but undistinguished, and Bismarck's father, Ferdinand, had accomplished nothing of note. On the other hand, Bismarck's mother, born Wilhelmine Menken, came from a Prussian civil service family, and her father had been a close advisor to Frederick the Great. Her intelligence, learnedness and attraction to city life made her ill-suited to Ferdinand von Bismarck's lethargic country life-style. Otto took after his mother, but resented her coldness and admired his father, whom he idolized as an exemplar of the Prussian junker tradition. As A.J.P. Taylor writes, "He was the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthy father."

Bismarck spent his first seven years on the family's estate at Kniephof in Pomerania, until 1822 when he and his older brother went with their mother to Berlin to go to school there. Bismarck and his brother were sent to the best-regarded grammar school in the city and, given his mother's family connections to the royal house, Bismarck came into close contact with younger members of the royal family, including the crown prince Frederick William and his younger brother, the future William I, whom he would later serve for nearly thirty years.

Bismarck was sent to university at Göttingen, in the Kingdom of Hanover, one of the premier universities of Germany. Bismarck led a riotous student lifestyle, drinking and fighting duels, and here first adopted the reactionary politics which would characterize his early years. His expensive lifestyle sent him back to Berlin after three terms, and he put in another year at the University of Berlin. In May 1835, at the age of 20, Bismarck passed the civil service exams and entered the Prussian civil service.

Bismarck was first sent to Aachen, in the Rhineland, where he spent several years ignoring his duties and falling in love with a series of English girls. After abandoning his post to follow one girl around Germany for three months, Bismarck joined the army for his compulsory year of service as an officer in Potsdam, where he renewed his acquaintance with members of the Prussian royal family. After leaving the army in 1839, Bismarck resigned from the civil service. With his mother having just died and his father incompetent to run the family estates, Bismarck took up the lifestyle of a Prussian junker in managing the family's Pomeranian estates. He remained there, aside from one brief return to the civil service in 1844, for the next eight years. It was in this time that he met and married his wife, Johanna von Puttkamer, and found religion, adopting a quietist Lutheranism that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

In 1847 Bismarck was appointed to the Prussian legislature, and after the 1849 constitution he was elected to the lower house of the new Prussian Parliament, the Landtag. While there he opposed the German unification movement because Austria was poised to be its new leader (the major proposals at the time called for unification via the Austrian-dominated German Confederation of which Prussia was a member.) As a result Bismarck was elected by the Landtag to represent Prussia at the Erfurt Parliament to vigorously oppose the unification movement.

In 1852, Bismarck was sent to Frankfurt as the Prussian representative to the German Confederation. Here he continued his position of opposition to Austria's German policy, helping to stymie Austrian efforts to seek German diplomatic support for its position in the Crimean War. In 1858 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia suffered a stroke and became mentally incapacitated and his brother, Prince Wilhelm, took over as regent. Wilhelm, recognizing Bismarck's ability, appointed him to ambassador to the Russian court in Saint Petersburg. At the same time Wilhelm also appointed Helmuth von Moltke as Chief of the Prussian General Staff and Albrecht von Roon as Minister of War. Roon, in particular, would become a close ally of Bismarck, helping to keep Bismarck informed about Prussian internal politics while he was at the Russian court.

Four years later, in 1862, the dominant Liberals in the Landtag clashed with Wilhelm (now king as Wilhelm I) over the king's budget and military spending. In the Prussian Parliament, like most other parliaments, power lay in its control of the allocation of the Prussian treasury. The liberals threatened to not pass the budget, and thus not give any money to the government, unless Wilhelm reduced military spending. This led to a crisis, with the elderly king seriously considering abdication over the issue. Roon and other conservative Prussian politicians urged the appointment of Bismarck as Prime Minister, arguing that he was the only man who could take on parliament and defeat it over the issue. Bismarck, however, insisted that he would only take over if he was given complete control over both domestic and foreign affairs, and Wilhelm balked at this, instead sending Bismarck to Paris as ambassador at the court of the French emperor Napoleon III. However in late 1862 the Landtag resoundingly rejected a proposed compromise from Wilhelm, so Wilhelm appointed Bismarck as both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Bismarck took office, and declared that because the constitution didn't cover the situation of what would happen if the Landtag refused to approve a budget (it lacked the power to propose a budget) then the budget from the previous year would legally come into effect. Legally this was a very fuzzy issue, and Bismarck wasn't clearly in the right, but wasn't necessarily wrong either. Nonetheless the Landtag protested to the king, and when this didn't work (and taxes were collected under the 1861 Budget) they passed a resolution that it could never work with Bismarck, and told Wilhelm to appoint a new prime. Wilhelm, in response, told the Landtag that, with the budget issue cleared up, he had no further use for them and dissolved the Landtag. To silence the liberal protests to this Bismarck passed a number of edicts restricting the freedom of the press, but despite this he was still an unpopular leader and over two/thirds of the seats in the Landtag went to liberals in the next election, however the King stuck with Bismarck throughout the storm of criticism.

In 1863, the King of Denmark died. This was an issue because two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, were claimed both by Denmark and by a German duke. The German people resoundingly demanded that the German duke get the territories, whereas Denmark was in the process of writing a new constitution that would make Schleswig officially part of Denmark. The issues lay in the facts that Holstein was both German speaking and ethnic in origin, while Schleswig was mixed between German and Danish, that Holstein was a member of the German Confederation while Schleswig was not, that the Treaty of Ribe (dating backto the fifteenth century]) mandated that the two provinces could not be separated, and that the German Liberal Nationalists were agitating for the German duke to take over the two provinces as one separate German nation. In response to this, seeing a ripe opportunity to gain territory and prestige, Bismarck declared openly that Prussia supported the Danish claim to the duchies, but at the same time said that Prussia would not tolerate Schleswig becoming a part of Denmark under the new constitution. Denmark didn't budge and Prussia, with the support of Austria-Hungary, declared war and defeated the Danes in the Second War of Schleswig. In the end result Denmark ceded authority over control of the provinces, however rather than turn the issue over to the German Confederation, which voting democratically would give the provinces to the Duke who laid claim to the provinces, Bismarck convinced the Austrian Empire to split the administration of the two provinces between them under the Gastein Convention. In this way Bismarck was able to squelch liberal nationalism while at the same time gain control of the provinces from Denmark (and appear to be the aggrieved party, and not the aggressor,) and was able to set the stage for the Austro-Prussian War.

Bismarck still wanted to unify Germany, but Austria-Hungary and particularly the Austrian dominated "German Confederation" stood in his way. In order to unify Germany Bismarck needed a way around them, and to this effect he used the splitting of Schleswig and Holstein. Holstein (the German Duchy) went to the Austrians while Schleswig (the mixed duchy) went to the Prussians, Bismarck then used the press to agitate the people of Holstein against the Austrians, who he portrayed as foreign occupiers, and sold the story to the Prussian and North German Countries as well. Alarmed by the growing discontent in Holstein the Austrians demanded that the issue of control over Schleswig and Holstein be settled by the German Confederation, Bismarck jumped at this, and said that the Austrians had violated the Gastein Convention, and declared war. A large number of the small southern German States sided with Austria in this, while the northern German states sided with Prussia, along with Italy (who wanted to reclaim Venetia from Austria.) The Austro-Prussian war was a very short war, Moltke and Von Roon had re-organized the Prussian army and turned it into an exceptionally effective fighting machine, and defeated Austria in The Seven Weeks War. Austria was humiliated, but rather then press on Bismarck got Wilhelm to stop the war early, and forced Austria to cede all of its German possessions (Prussia could have gone for a lot more, but Bismarck didn't want to engender future disagreements over this.) The result of this was three fold, first Austria was no longer a player in Germany politics, second the German confederation was disbanded, and third Prussia was acknowledged as the new leader of Germany internationally. To solidify his successes Bismarck North German Confederation as a federation between the Northern German allies from the last war and Prussia, with Prussia at its head with King Wilhelm as President, and Bismarck as Chancellor.

This successful war ended the domestic disturbances at home, got Bismarck's supporters elected into the Prussian Landtag, and provided support to Bismarck in the times to come. With the Liberals squelched at home, for now, Austria out of the picture, and North Germany united Bismarck just needed a way to get the southern German states under Prussian control. The only feasible way Bismarck saw to do this was to have a foreign power invade Germany and for Germany to unify to face the threat, and then for Prussia to seize the opportunity to permanently unify under that system as one nation. The chance arrived in 1870 when the throne of Spain was offered to a relative of the Hohenzollern clan (The ruling family of Prussia,) Napolean the Third announced not only that he would not stand for his candidacy for the throne, but demanded that King Wilhelm promise never to allow a member of the Hohenzollern family to ascend to the Spanish Throne. Wilhelm wrote a cordial reply to Napolean saying that while he would not remove his support from the candidate immediately he would be willing to discuss the issue with Napolean. Bismarck, however, took the telegram, edited it so as to read as an affront to Napolean and leaked it to the press in the famous Ems Dispatch. The French reacted vehemently and in a national uproar declared the Franco-Prussian war. Seeing them as an aggressor the entirety of Germany rallied behind Prussia, and Prussia defeated the French invasion force, counter-invaded, and utterly defeated France, all in under a month. France was forced to pay a large indemnity to Prussia and to surrender the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (Bismarck opposed this, saying that the territories would only cause more trouble than they were worth.) Bismarck used the opportunity to unify Germany, and through a variety of incentives got the southern German states to agree to form a German Empire with Prussia as Primus inter Pares (first among equals) and King Wilhelm as the first German Emperor.

References

• Taylor, A.J.P. Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955).