Otto von Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor

"Only a country's most vital interests justify its embarking on war." - Bismarck.

An excerpt from, "Why Bismarck Loved Lincoln" By Kenneth Weisbrode, The New York Times, October 2, 2011:

Perhaps no one was more in tune with Lincoln than Otto von Bismarck, the minister-president of Prussia. Beginning in 1862, Bismarck unified Germany, but he explicitly rejected the idea of a "Großdeutschland," or "Greater Germany," incorporating Austria, in favor of a "kleindeutsche Lösung," or "Little German Solution," that preferred centralization over maximum territorial expansion. This may have been one reason why, after the Civil War ended, Bismarck reportedly sounded out Washington on an alliance. It made sense: Europe's rising industrial and military power seeking common cause with an American counterpart that seemed destined for the same.

An excerpt from, "Imperial Germany’s Jewish Banker" By A.J.P. Taylor, The New York Review, February 17, 1977:

Gerson Bleichröder rose highest of all Jews in Imperial Germany. He was the Rothschild of Berlin, his wealth second only to Alfred Krupp’s. He was the first Prussian Jew to become a “von” without conversion to Christianity. What carried him to greatness was his association with Bismarck. Bleichröder was Bismarck’s financial agent and adviser for more than thirty years—from the early days when Bismarck was Prussian representative at the Frankfurt Diet until his own death in 1893. He handled Bismarck’s private accounts and directed Bismarck’s investments on a basis profitable to both. Throughout these thirty years Bismarck saw more of Bleichröder than of any minister or diplomat, perhaps more even than of Emperor William I.

An excerpt from, "Gold and Iron: The Collaboration and Friendship of Gerson Bleichröder and Otto von Bismarck" By Fritz Stern, The American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Oct., 1969): 

From 1859 to Bleichröder's death in 1893, the two men conferred and collaborated regularly, each deriving profit from the other’s help. Despite the obvious inequality of birth and rank, something approaching intimacy ripened. Over the years thousands of letters were exchanged, and the two men saw each other hundreds of times. With how many other people, outside his family, did Bismarck cherish such relations? The turnover in his entourage was after all fairly rapid, a fact rarely noted and yet related to the growing loneliness of Bismarck's later years. Chancellor and banker grew old and lonely together. Few people in the 1870s and 1880s still received ten- or twelve-page letters in Bismarck's hand---letters that characteristically enough do not show up in the magisterial edition of Bismarck's correspondence.

There was, to be sure, something incongruous about a relationship between two men so different from each other. What was it that linked the Jew---hedged in by apprehensions and uncertainties, a partial stranger in the land he loved too well, living off his intelligence, his integrity, his inexhaustible industry---and the Junker, with his early, Byronic self-confidence, his half-affected disdain of money, custom, and Jews, his irrepressible courage, and his soaring ambition? What they shared was an appetite for power and an appreciation of intelligence; what brought them together was their usefulness to each other. One of them was, of course, inferior to the other, but Bleichröder had learned the forms of subservience in dealing with that exacting dynasty, the Rothschilds, whose Berlin agent the Bleichröders had been since the 1830's. The Rothschilds lent the House of Bleichröder its initial distinction; the tie with Bismarck gave Bleichröder his unique standing in Germany and the world.

The story of Bismarck and Bleichröder, then, is one of reciprocal need and assistance. Bleichröder's role was in many respects anachronistic. In his service to Bismarck he stood somewhere between a traditional court Jew and a modern trouble shooter like Harry Hopkins. He served Bismarck in a wide variety of roles, in both public and private realms. And what could Bismarck do for Bleichröder? He could use him in these many different roles and, by so doing, give him the imprimatur of national reliability, for a banker who enjoyed the Chancellor's confidence assumed a unique place in the business world of Berlin. By various favors that governments could extend, Bismarck helped to augment---and to legitimize---Bleichröder's fortune. Bleichröder rendered service, and Bismarck conferred status; such a summary does violence to countless other features, but catches something of the essence of their relationship.

Bleichröder's steady usefulness to Bismarck in the political realm constituted one of the highlights of their relationship. Like his model, the Rothschilds, Bleichröder believed in the immense importance of receiving better and faster information than his competitors. He belonged to what must be called the Rothschild intelligence network, and in time he managed to surpass it by adding his own strategically placed informants. His correspondents included some of the leading diplomats and businessmen of Europe; they knew that Bleichröder had easy access to Bismarck, and men like to share confidences with friends who are close to power. Bleichröder may have supplied Bismarck with more information than he needed; in turn the Chancellor used Bleichröder to convey thoughts and inclinations to foreign leaders without having to rely on the more official and possibly less discreet efforts of his ambassadors. No wonder that by the 1860s the Berlin banker Bleichröder considered himself an auxiliary of the Foreign Office and referred to Bismarck as Der Chef. Bismarck could rely on Bleichröder's disciplined discretion when it mattered, but Bleichröder's vanity and good business sense combined to let the world know that he was Bismarck’s confidant.

In Bismarck's hardest days as Prussian Prime Minister, Bleichröder proved his beneficial loyalty. Dazzled by Bismarck's resourceful diplomacy, historians have lost sight of the fact that the wars of 1864 and 1866 posed major fiscal problems for a government that because of a recalcitrant Diet could raise no extra loans or new taxes. In that crisis Bleichröder pointed the way to an intricate and probably unconstitutional solution. He advocated the conversion of the government’s rights to shares of the Cologne-Minden Railway, with which Bleichröder happened to have had long and close connections. The mobilization of that additional capital  gave Prussia the necessary fiscal backbone for waging a major war. Both Bismarck and his friend and War Minister, Count Albrecht von Roon, acknowledged the importance of that transaction, and Bismarck treasured Bleichröder's fidelity at a time when, as he put it, he stood as close to the gallows as to the throne.

An excerpt from, "Bismarck and the Great Game: Germany and Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia, 1871-1890" By James Stone, Central European History, vol. 48, no. 2, 2015:

Yet, the important contribution made by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to the political intrigues that characterized this century-long competition for empire has been largely overlooked. The fact that Bismarck's part in this drama as a clever manipulator of Anglo-Russian rivalry has remained obscure for so long is in itself a tribute to how subtly he played his diplomatic hand. His relative anonymity as a participant in no way implies a lack of interest or involvement. On the contrary, the fate of the tribal peoples inhabiting the distant Asian steppes was, in fact, a major focus of Bismarck's attention. Accordingly, he invested considerable time and effort in attempting to shape the course of events in that strife-torn region. Although this behavior may appear counterintuitive, given the lack of any obvious German interests in that region, it was rooted firmly in the logic of European power politics.

Wikipedia:

Summarizing Bismarck's mastery of diplomacy, Jonathan Steinberg argues:

In international relations, it meant absolutely no emotional commitment to any of the actors. Diplomacy should, he believed, deal with realities, calculations of probabilities, assessing the inevitable missteps and sudden lurches by the other actors, states, and their statesmen. The chessboard could be overseen and it suited Bismarck's peculiar genius for politics to maintain in his head multiple possible moves by adversaries....He had his goals in mind and achieved them. He was and remained to the end master of the finely tuned game of diplomacy. He enjoyed it. In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless. He could outsmart and outplay the smartest people in other states.

. . .Having unified his nation, Bismarck now devoted himself to promoting peace in Europe with his skills in statesmanship. He was forced to contend with French revanchism, the desire to avenge the losses of the Franco-Prussian War. Bismarck, therefore, engaged in a policy of diplomatically isolating France while maintaining cordial relations with other nations in Europe. He had little interest in naval or colonial entanglements and thus avoided discord with Great Britain. Historians emphasize that he wanted no more territorial gains after 1871, and vigorously worked to form cross-linking alliances that prevented any war in Europe from starting. By 1878 both the Liberal and Conservative spokesmen in Britain hailed him as the champion of peace in Europe. A. J. P. Taylor, a leading British diplomatic historian, concludes that, "Bismarck was an honest broker of peace; and his system of alliances compelled every Power, whatever its will, to follow a peaceful course".

An excerpt from, "German History, 1789-1871: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Bismarckian Reich" By Eric Dorn Brose, Berghahn Books, 1997, Pgs. 50 - 52., and 61 - 64:

The string of disasters which began at Austerlitz and ended at Friedland was a phenomenon far too complex to be attributed solely to the military genius of Napoleon. It is more useful to view these debacles as a product of the relatively backward social and political systems of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. While Napoleon, Ney, Davout and other top French generals had advanced to their positions because of unusual abilities, the eastern armies were commanded or influenced by hereditary monarchs of limited talent who were surrounded by officers selected exclusively from the narrow ranks of the nobility. Sometimes the system produced a Frederick the Great, an Archduke Charles, or a Kutuzov; more often, however, it advanced anachronisms and mediocrities like the Duke of Brunswick, the unfortunate General Mack of Ulm, or General Buxhöwden, the drunkard of Austerlitz. This relative dearth of talent was not only a battlefield liability, but also affected the crucial maneuvering stage of a campaign. Thus Napoleon could trust the capable leaders of his mobile, semi-autonomous army corps to move under general orders in a general direction before converging to give battle. The relatively inept, class-bound army leadership of the Old Regime was usually unable to do this.

The comparative ineffectiveness of Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies was related in other ways to the backwardness of these societies. Another reason for French mobility, for instance, was their willingness to live off the land. German and Russian armies occasionally resorted to this practice, but usually avoided it for fear that serf-peasant recruits, unpatriotic victims of the society they were forced to defend, would desert while foraging. France's citizen soldier would sometimes desert, but the problem was not systemic in nature. Similarly, French commanders could allow their troops to chase a defeated army and rout it; eastern generals knew that thousands of their serf infantrymen would never return to camp. Fear of armed peasant revolt also prevented serious consideration of the levée en masse. Unless a united coalition faced him, therefore, Napoleon entered campaigns with numerical superiority. Repeatedly, however, the overconfident monarchs refused to coordinate their movements, convinced, as they were, that no illegitimate upstart from Corsica could defeat sovereigns chosen by God.

For a variety of reasons, moreover, Bonaparte could rely on the holders of wealth in France to lend money to his ambitious regime. The mechanism of lending was institutionalized in 1800 with the creation of the Bank of France. In Austria, Prussia, and Russia, no modern institutions of public finance existed. This inadequacy reflected not only the relative commercial and industrial backwardness of Germany and Russia vis à vis the West, but more importantly, the fact that merchants and bankers who possessed funds had less incentive to lend money to an absolutist state which neither respected them nor desired their participation in government. The relative limits which politics placed on government borrowing were a great liability in this long era of unlimited warfare.

This one-sided military conflict of the modern and the backward determined the ultimate fate of the Holy Roman Empire. In December 1805 Napoleon compelled Francis II to recognize Württemberg, Bavaria, and Saxony as sovereign kingdoms. In July 1806 he forced Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, the Duchy of Berg, and eleven lesser dukes and princes in western Germany to join a newly formulated Confederation of the Rhine. The member states became allies of France and pledged themselves to raise an army of 63,000 men. With Napoleon as their "Protector," the confederate governments were not permitted to remain in the Holy Roman Empire. The involuntary secession of the sixteen was followed in August 1806 by the inevitable abdication of Francis as Holy Roman Emperor. An empire of a thousand years passed away with him. The imperious nature of these changes and the shifting balance of power had nudged Frederick William III toward war later that year. But the armies of the Fourth Coalition failed in their stipulated mission of pushing the French out of Germany. Rather, the battles of Jena, Auerstädt, and Friedland confirmed the political rearrangements begun in the aftermath of Austerlitz. (Pg. 50 - 52).

It was a largely unchanged Old Regime that Prussian soldiers left behind as they marched to their fate at Jena and Auerstädt. The country's king, Frederick William III, was a moody pragmatist who had meant well since ascending the throne in 1797. In stark con trast to Francis in Austria, the Hohenzollern's administration had discussed ambitious reforms such as reorganization of the bureaucracy along French lines, peasant emancipation, a popular militia, termination of guild restrictions, and other measures to liberalize the economy. But Frederick William possessed neither the self- assurance to trust his instincts and his enlightened advisers, nor the audacity to challenge conservatives entrenched in the bureaucracy, army, and nobility. Consequently, the social, governmental, and military system of Frederick the Great came crashing down in 1806, a victim of France's spreading revolution.

The totality of the defeat shocked everyone. Prussia's finest were thoroughly routed on the battlefield; many of her fortress towns, including Berlin, were captured without a shot; the country from Jena to Eylau was ravaged; and the peasants remained indifferent to everything but French foraging parties at harvest time. Further campaigning brought the ignominious Treaty of Tilsit. The kingdom that previous Hohenzollerns had forged into a great European power was halved in size, compelled to support a French army of occupation, and forced to pay a huge indemnity. Prussian ports were closed to English commerce and a decade of lucrative agricultural exports to the booming industrial island halted. The subsequent recession in an already devastated countryside quickly spread to the towns, where many artisans and manufacturers had to close shop. Prussia's tax base was demolished, making it doubly difficult to pay the French. It is no wonder that Frederick WIlliam sank into a deep depression during his first months in Memel and Königsberg.

Discredited and politically paralyzed by this disaster, Prussian conservatives were pushed into the wings by advocates of change who had languished politically during the long, frustrating years of peace. In the army, reformers grouped around the new minister of war, Gerhard Scharnhorst, an innovative Hanoverian who had transferred into Prussian service in 1801. Allied with his circle were two groups of talented civilians around Karl August von Hardenberg, chief minister during the gloomy spring of 1807, and Baron Karl vom Stein, Hardenberg's successor until the fall of 1808. Hardenberg returned to the chancellery in 1810 to continue the work of reform and revitalization. Still relatively young and idealistic, these men envisioned a thoroughgoing overhaul of state and society which would charge the Prussian nation with energies untapped by the outmoded institutions of Frederick the Great. Thus Prussia met France's revolutionary challenge with strategies strikingly different from the business as usual approach of the Austrians.

Scharnhorst set to work in the summer of 1807. Above all, he wanted to end the aristocratic privileges encouraged in the past. The officer corps should be opened to all social classes with admission based on education and competitive examination. Promotion should be based on merit. Alongside the regular army, moreover, would arise a national guard to lend popular fervor to a war of liberation against Napoleon. With the exception of the national guard, these recommendations were approved by Frederick William and implemented in 1808 and 1809. The king feared that an overtly aggressive institution like the national guard might alarm the French. He also doubted whether the Prussian people would rally to the colors. This reform would wait until March 1813.

Like Scharnhorst, Stein and Hardenberg strove to transform a country of dejected subjects into a nation of inspired citizens. One of Stein's early edicts in 1807 eliminated the personal duties that serfs owed to lords, abolished legal distinctions between noblemen and commoners, eliminated the nobility's exclusive right to own land, and proclaimed the right of all citizens - not just guild shops in towns to practice a trade. The latter decree had added significance because Prussia had enforced the old law in order to facilitate tax collection inside city walls, thus retarding the spread of putting-out industry to Prussian lands. Another decree of 1808 granted towns and cities far-reaching rights of self-governance. Stein also borrowed the system of functional ministries introduced by the French, Westphalians, and South Germans. Before he could make proposals for a central representative body, however, Stein became implicated in a military conspiracy against the French that forced him from office. His immediate successors, Alexander von Dohna and Karl von Altenstein, were unable to maintain Stein's political momentum.

Hardenberg's second ministry picked up the cudgel of reform in the autumn of 1810. Preceding his first acts - and enhancing the atmosphere of rebirth - came the dual inaugurations of the University of Berlin and the War School. The former was the crowning accomplishment of Wilhelm von Humboldt, head of the new Ministry of Culture until June 1810. For over two decades, Humboldt had favored individual intellectual growth in a free political atmosphere, but recognized the benefits which state institutions could provide to individuals. The liberal regime of the University of Berlin with its far-reaching academic freedom for professors and students was the realization of Humboldt's dream. Scharnhorst's War School offered a much more regimented curriculum of science and the humanities, but here too the aim was the intellectual growth of each officer candidate. From these two institutes, the officers and civil servants of the new Prussia were to spring forth. (Pg. 61 - 64).

Video Title: Otto von Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor. Source: Apostolic Majesty. Date Published: May 19, 2021.

 

Video Title: Jonathan Steinberg - Bismarck: A Life - November 29, 2012. Source: The Kansas City Public Library. Date Published: January 2, 2013.