The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A country squire with no army, no party and no mass following, who made Germany out of the sheer force of a gigantic personality, a "sovereign self" that read the chessboard of Europe better than anyone alive and poisoned everything it could not dominate.
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
Taking Office Against Parliament (September 1862)
When Roon's telegram "Periculum in mora. Dépêchez-vous" reached him, Bismarck came. At Babelsberg on 22 September the King showed him the abdication document and asked whether he would push the army reorganization "in opposition to the majority in parliament and its resolutions."
- 2
Ruling Without a Budget, Then Asking Forgiveness (1862-1866)
Bismarck did neither. He announced that where the constitution left "a 'hole'," residual powers remained with the Crown, so that the government could "collect taxes and make expenditures, even if the legislature refused to approve such acts."
- 3
Using Austria, Then Destroying Her (1863-1866)
In December 1863 Bismarck argued in Crown Council for outright annexation. He made Austria his partner against Denmark, used the London Conference of 1864 "to let loose against the Danes all the dogs that want to howl," and exploited the Augustenburg claim until it was useless; he later boasted to Beust that he had "'hitched' the Augustenburg ox to the…
- 4
The Lenient Peace at Nikolsburg (July 1866)
Bismarck refused. Six days after the battle he wrote to Johanna that he had "the thankless task of pouring cold water into the bubbling cauldron and reminding people that we do not live alone in Europe but with three neighbours."
- 5
Editing the Ems Telegram (13 July 1870)
The French then overreached: their ambassador Benedetti demanded at Ems that the King promise never again to permit such a candidacy, and the King refused to see him again. At dinner on 13 July with Moltke and Roon, Bismarck received the King's telegram with permission to publish.
- 6
The Stick and the Carrot for the Workers (1878-1889)
He did two opposite things at once. The Anti-Socialist Law passed on 19 October 1878 by 221 to 149, banning associations aiming "to overthrow the existing state and social order," along with their meetings and publications.
Maxims
Out-savage the savages, then take off the costume
At Göttingen he won the best duelling club by insulting all its leaders and cutting them up, then told Motley in private that he had to be "ten times as extravagant and savage as any one else."
Tell them your plan; they won't believe you
In 1862 he told Disraeli, in front of the Austrian envoy, that he would reform the army, pick a war with Austria and unify Germany.
After winning, ask what's necessary, not what you can squeeze
At Nikolsburg he refused the King's provinces and parade because "one could hardly fatally wound those with whom later one would want and indeed have to live." The Austria he spared in 1866 became his ally in 1879.
Make the other side fire first
At the Ems dinner he wanted the edited telegram to work as "a red rag upon the Gallic bull" because "it is important that we should be the party attacked." The Crown Princess, no friend, wrote that Prussia had been "shamelessly forced into this war."
Never let love or hatred choose your allies
He told Gerlach that "not even the king has the right to subordinate the interests of the country to his own feelings of love or hate towards foreigners." In foreign affairs he lived by this; Steinberg notes he "never lost his temper" there.
Part IThe Story
He Means What He Says
In June 1862, a Prussian diplomat on a visit to London sat down in the parlour of the Russian ambassador and told the most gifted politician in England exactly what he intended to do over the next decade. Benjamin Disraeli, then in opposition, listened. The Austrian envoy, Count Vitzthum, was in the room. The Prussian spoke, Disraeli recorded, "in his astonishingly frank way":
"I shall soon be compelled to undertake the conduct of the Prussian government. My first care will be to reorganize the army, with or without, the help of the Landtag … As soon as the army shall have 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. I have come here to say this to the Queen's ministers."
He was announcing a war against the very country whose ambassador was sitting beside him. On the way home, Disraeli walked Vitzthum to his residence and said, as they parted: "Take care of that man; he means what he says."
"And he did," writes Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck's biographer. Nine years later, almost to the day, a victory parade passed through Berlin, and Otto von Bismarck had "accomplished much more than in 1862 he had impudently promised his astonished listeners in the ambassador's parlour."
Steinberg calls the nine years from 1862 to 1871 "the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries" — achieved "without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority." Bismarck had no army of his own, no party, no mass following. He never held sovereign power. What he had, in Steinberg's phrase, was "a kind of 'sovereign self'" — a personality so large that all who knew him testify to "a kind of magnetic pull or attraction which even those who hated him could not deny." The British ambassador Odo Russell put it more darkly in 1871: "The demonic is stronger in him, than in any man I know."
That self made Germany. It also poisoned nearly everything it could not dominate. He is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness because the two facts cannot be separated.
By the Numbers
The Iron Chancellor
83Years lived (1815–1898)
25Duels fought in three semesters at university
273 to 68Landtag vote against the army reform that brought him to power
~4 yearsPrussia governed without a legal budget, 1862–1866
26Years in office under William I
3Wars fought to unify Germany: Denmark, Austria, France
19Quarto volumes of collected works, averaging 500+ pages each
The Fox Who Insulted Everyone
He was born in 1815 into the Prussian landed gentry, the Junker class, and he hated his mother. "As a small child I hated her," he later said; "later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods." Steinberg notes that "he had lied to his mother from early childhood and continued to lie all his life." He left school "a Pantheist, and, if not a Republican, at least with the persuasion that the Republic was the most rational form of government" — though his "historical sympathies remained on the side of authority."
At Göttingen, a Boston student named John Lothrop Motley met the seventeen-year-old Bismarck on a student drinking tour and later put him into a novel as "Otto von Rabenmark." The young fox wore "a chaotic coat without collar or buttons," "enormously wide trousers and boots with iron heels and portentous spurs," a huge sabre and a seal-ring. When four students laughed at his dog, he challenged three of them to duels and forced the fourth "to jump over Rabenmark's stick like a dog."
Then, back in his bare room hung with a hundred silhouettes of friends, he threw down his pistols and sabre and said: "There... I can leave my buffoonery for a while and be reasonable." He explained how he had got into the best duelling club without knowing a single member: "I insulted them all publicly and in the grossest possible manner... and after I had cut off the senior's nose, sliced off the con-senior's upper lip, moustachios and all... the whole club in admiration of my prowess... voted me in by acclamation." And then the credo: "I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life... to obtain mastery over my competitors, who were all, extravagant, savage, eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant and savage as any one else."
Erich Marcks, who interviewed Bismarck in old age, judged Motley's portrait accurate and counted twenty-five duels in three semesters. Steinberg sees the entire later method in the scene: calculated extremism, a costume put on and shed at will, and the urge to dominate "by the force of his personality."
In his twenties he was, by contrast, a bored and lonely country squire. The "mad Junker" of Kniephof wrote, "I am so bored I could hang myself when I am alone," and "I feel more and more how alone I am in the world." In Aachen, Steinberg records, he was also "six foot four, slender, a fine linguist... and was utterly, utterly charming." In a suitor's letter of December 1846 he described having been baptized with "no other faith than naked deism," and then, after the death of his friend Marie von Thadden, "the first sincere prayer" and "a will to live as I had never before known it." Steinberg finds that the letter "says very little about Bismarck's state of soul."
The Extremist Who Could Take Off the Costume
In 1847 Bismarck entered politics in the Prussian United Diet and made himself "the most extreme of extremists" among the ultra-conservatives — a posture, Steinberg writes, that he "could shed as easily as he took off his extravagant costume at Göttingen." He lied to Johanna about his first speech, sending her a version that "was false." The habit of editing the record started there and never stopped.
His breakthrough came with a speech that seemed to defend a humiliation. In 1850 Prussia had backed down before Austria at Olmütz, and the patriotic mood demanded revenge. On 3 December, Bismarck rose and defended the retreat: "The only sound basis for a large state is egoism and not romanticism... It is not worthy for a large state to fight a war that is not in its own interests." Prussia's honour did not consist "of playing Don Quixote to every offended parliamentary bigwig in Germany." Conservatives printed 20,000 copies. It was his debut as the practitioner of what would be called Realpolitik — and, one historian argues, a bid "to recommend himself for a high state office."
It worked. He was sent as Prussia's envoy to the German Diet at Frankfurt, where he spent nine years. There he learned to treat Europe as a chessboard. France counted for him "merely as a piece, though an unavoidable one, in the game of political chess," he wrote to his patron Leopold von Gerlach, and Prussia could not prosper while "a portion of the European chess-board will remain closed against us." "Sympathies and antipathies with regard to foreign Powers and persons" must not "take precedence over my sense of duty"; "not even the king has the right to subordinate the interests of the country to his own feelings of love or hate towards foreigners." He took his standard "only from the harm or good that I judge them capable of doing to Prussia," because "in the policy of sentiment there is no reciprocity of any kind."
At Frankfurt only the Austrian president, Count Thun, had by custom the right to smoke in session. When Thun lit a cigar, Bismarck, "in order to show the equal status of Prussia immediately lit up a cigar as well." When the orator Georg von Vincke mocked in the Landtag that Bismarck's "only achievement had been the 'burning cigar'," Bismarck's reply provoked a challenge. On 25 March 1852 they met by the lake at Tegel. The witness reduced the duel to one shot each and offered withdrawal for an apology. "Since I could not in good conscience do that, we both took our pistols, shot... and both missed." Bismarck's only regret: "the reduction of the challenge annoyed me and I would have preferred to continue the fight."
Frankfurt also revealed something uglier. Bismarck sent his dispatches first to General Leopold von Gerlach, who had the King's ear over "coffee and cake," behind the back of his own chief, Otto von Manteuffel — the man who had helped arrange his appointment — while protesting that "I would be ashamed if he were to think that I played him false." Steinberg calls it "a contemptible betrayal" and "gross disloyalty."
Blood and Iron
By September 1862 the Prussian monarchy was in crisis. The Landtag had rejected the army reform by 273 votes to 68, ministers had resigned, and King William I had drafted his abdication. Bismarck, then a diplomat, had "a reputation for utter unreliability, superficial cleverness and extremely reactionary views." The previous king had written of him in 1848: "Bismarck — to be used only when the bayonet rules without limit." The Queen regarded him as her "arch-enemy." No sensible monarch would have appointed him, Steinberg writes, "unless he had become desperate."
The War Minister, Albrecht von Roon, wired him: "Periculum in mora. Dépêchez-vous" — danger in delay; hurry. Bismarck came. At Babelsberg on 22 September the King showed him the abdication document and asked whether he would push the army reorganization through "in opposition to the majority in parliament and its resolutions." Bismarck said yes. The King replied: "Then it is my duty, with your help, to attempt to continue the battle, and I shall not abdicate."
A week later Bismarck told the Budget Committee: "The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by blood and iron." It was not a new thought; he had said "more or less the same thing to all sorts and conditions of listeners." It was nevertheless a near-fatal blunder. Treitschke raged at "so shallow a country-squire as this Bismarck bragging about the 'iron and blood'." Steinberg writes that the speech "could easily have been his last and nearly was."
The King was at Baden-Baden with Queen Augusta and was ready to get rid of his new minister. Bismarck, knowing he had to reach him before Berlin, "took the unusual and desperate step of halting the train." He found William alone in an ordinary first-class compartment, depressed. Before Bismarck could speak, the King cut him off: "I can perfectly well see where all this will end. Over there, in front of the Opera House, under my windows, they will cut off your head, and mine a little while afterwards."
Bismarck answered with three words: "Et après, Sire?" — and after that, sire?
"Après, indeed; we shall be dead," said the King.
"Yes," Bismarck went on, "then we shall be dead; but we must all die sooner or later, and can we perish more honourably? I, fighting for my King's cause, and your Majesty sealing with your own blood your rights as King by the grace of God... you must, even at the risk of bodily danger, go forth to meet any attempt at coercion." As he spoke, by his own account, "the King grew more and more animated, and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland."
Steinberg warns that this account, from Bismarck's memoirs, "needs to be read with scepticism" — "a fine piece of Bismarck the novelist." But "the crisis passed and Bismarck stayed in office — just." William I would live long enough to give him twenty-six years. Had the King dismissed him after the speech, Steinberg believes, "Bismarck would have disappeared from history and Germany would almost certainly have been unified by a voluntary federation of sovereign princes."
— Otto von Bismarck to the Prussian Budget Committee, September 1862The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by blood and iron.
Ruling Through the Hole
The constitution gave parliament the budget, and the liberal majority refused to fund the army. The obvious options were to compromise on the length of military service — which Bismarck himself had wanted to offer in October 1862, before the King vetoed it — or to stage a coup. Liberals fully expected the second: they believed "the army would occupy Berlin and install a royal military dictatorship."
Bismarck did neither. He announced that where the constitution left "a 'hole'," residual power lay with the Crown, so that the government could "collect taxes and make expenditures, even if the legislature refused to approve such acts." This was the "gap theory," and it "gave Bismarck the confidence to push on with his almost certainly unconstitutional activities." In January 1863 he told the Landtag: "Constitutional life is a series of compromises. If these are frustrated, conflicts arise. Conflicts are questions of power, and whoever has power to hand, can go his own way." Count Schwerin cried out that this meant "power comes before morality."
He told the deputies the state "would and could live without a budget because it had to." In June 1863 he pushed through a press edict to "silence the opposition press by bureaucratic order." And at the same time, the arch-reactionary reached for democracy as a weapon. To stop the King attending an Austrian-led congress of princes, he "sprang the idea of universal suffrage on a startled German public," proposing a German parliament "chosen directly by the people" — knowing the small states "feared universal suffrage more than anything else." He even "negotiated with revolutionaries and the dangerous Lassalle."
For nearly four years Prussia was run without a legal budget.
Hitching the Ox
The Schleswig-Holstein question was a byword for complexity. Palmerston joked that "only three people have ever understood" it. Prussia had signed the London Protocol and had "no dynastic right nor claim to the Duchies." The King was a legitimist, and German opinion favoured the claim of the Duke of Augustenburg.
In December 1863 Bismarck argued in the Crown Council for outright annexation. He made Austria his partner in a war against Denmark, used the London Conference of 1864 "to let loose against the Danes all the dogs that want to howl," and exploited the Augustenburg claim until it was useless. He later boasted to Beust that he had "'hitched' the Augustenburg ox to the plough. 'As soon as the plough was in motion, I unhitched the ox.'"
Then he turned on his partner. He allied with Italy. He proposed a German parliament elected by universal suffrage to outflank the Austrians. With Austria he had long used what the Austrians came to expect as an "uncomfortable mix of threats and blandishments"; he had told the Austrian Karolyi in 1862, "Our relations must become either better or worse than they now are." In 1866 informed military opinion "expected Austria to win." Even Roon worried his friend had "worn down his nerves" through "Herculean day and night efforts."
At midnight on 15 June 1866, Bismarck walked in his garden with Lord Loftus, took out his watch, and told him that Prussian troops were at that moment entering Hanover, Saxony and Hesse. "If we are beaten... I shall fall in the last charge."
They were not beaten. Victory at Königgrätz made him "'Bismarck', the genius-statesman" within twenty-four hours, and "a victory abroad had destroyed the opposition at home" — "in exactly the way he outlined to Disraeli." In August he pounded his desk: "I have beaten them all! All!"
Then he turned around and had the King ask the Landtag for an "indemnity" for "the administration carried on without a budget law." The liberals, dazzled, granted it. Rudolf Ihering, who had called the war "frightful frivolity," now submitted to "the 'genius of Bismarck'." The price, Steinberg writes, was a German civil war, the abolition of whole states, and the permanent alienation of the conservative friends who had brought him to power.
The Sour Apple at Nikolsburg
After Königgrätz the King and much of the army wanted the fruits of victory. William I demanded, as Bismarck recalled, "Bohemia, Austrian Silesia, Ansbach-Bayreuth, East Friesland, a slice of Saxony," and a triumphal entry into Vienna. He insisted "that the chief culprit could not be allowed to escape unpunished."
Bismarck refused. Six days after the battle he wrote to Johanna that he had "the thankless task of pouring cold water into the bubbling cauldron and reminding people that we do not live alone in Europe but with three neighbours." He told the King "that we were not there to sit in judgment, but to pursue the German policy" — "not to administer retributive justice, but to pursue a policy." He told him "one could hardly fatally wound those with whom later one would want and indeed have to live." He laid down the maxim: "It is a political maxim after a victory not to enquire how much you can squeeze out of your opponent, but only to consider what is politically necessary."
He threatened resignation and, by his own account, went to his room wondering "whether it would not be better to fall out of the open window, which was four storeys high," until the Crown Prince intervened. The King conceded in a pencil note that he must "bite this sour apple and accept so disgraceful a peace."
Austria left German affairs, paid 40 million thaler, and kept her territory, which "explicitly left the door open for an eventual reconciliation." In 1879 "that reconciliation became an alliance." Steinberg calls Nikolsburg "his greatest moment in human and diplomatic terms." He also notes that Bismarck's memoir story of generals opposing the peace is "deeply misleading."
The same week showed the other Bismarck. Frankfurt, the city where he had spent nine years, refused a levy he had ordered. Its Bürgermeister, Fellner, committed suicide. On 25 July Bismarck added Frankfurt to the annexation list, "though it had not been on the 'maximum demands list' before."
A Red Rag Upon the Gallic Bull
Bismarck had pushed a Hohenzollern prince's candidacy for the Spanish throne over the King's own opposition. When France protested in July 1870, the King himself arranged the withdrawal. On 12 July Bismarck read the telegrams in his carriage and "thought of resigning. Prussia, he judged, had suffered a humiliation worse than Olmütz." Moltke arrived "red in the face" because "the war which he had already firmly planned seemed to recede."
Then the French overreached. At Ems their ambassador, Benedetti, demanded that the King promise never again to permit such a candidacy, and the King refused to see him again. At dinner on 13 July with Moltke and Roon, Bismarck received the King's telegram reporting the encounter, with permission to publish.
The two accounts of what he did next differ. In Steinberg's, "he took a pencil and edited what he had received from the King to make it sound more offensive." In Bismarck's own, he "reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering," so that it would "have the effect of a red rag upon the Gallic bull." Both agree on the purpose: "it is important that we should be the party attacked."
France mobilized on 14 July and declared war on 19 July. Bismarck later claimed his editing forced Napoleon III into war, "though evidence suggests that France had decided to fight earlier." The Crown Princess, no friend of his, wrote that Prussia had been "shamelessly forced into this war." On 10 July, meanwhile, Bismarck had wired his private banker, Gerson Bleichröder — taken on in 1859 on Rothschild advice — to sell his railroad shares — which "today... would be an example of 'insider trading'." Of the ambassador Werther, who had tried to avert the war, General Waldersee wrote that "Bismarck never spoke to him again."
To secure the Bavarian king's letter inviting William to become Emperor, he used a secret fund to pay Ludwig II 300,000 marks — "in effect, a royal bribe." On 18 January 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
And then he made the mistake he had avoided in 1866. Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine. He had once told Gerlach that "one could not play chess if 16 out of the 64 squares were blocked in advance." Now "sixteen of the sixty-four had been blocked permanently: France would never ally with Germany."
The Enemies of the Reich
The Reich he designed had a Reichstag elected by universal manhood suffrage and a Prussia that remained three-quarters of the whole, with no imperial army or foreign ministry separate from Prussia's. Steinberg calls it "an unstable structure of rule" that "only he could steer"; Sir Edward Grey compared it to "a huge battleship without a rudder."
At home, Bismarck could not stop fighting. "Among the seven deadly sins, Bismarck committed repeatedly and without limit the sin of wrath." He turned on the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf, and by 1876 "all Prussian bishops were either in custody or in exile," though "Prussia was never threatened by its Catholic population." When the Catholic Centre party shouted "shame," his first instinct was to throw his inkstand at them. He alternated, as always, carrots and sticks — banning the Jesuits while urging that the salaries of the lower Catholic clergy be raised — and tried "to slide the Vatican between the Catholic masses and the Centre Party." Against the Progressives he let anti-Semitic agitation run, to split "the Jews and respectable German progressives."
His allies he used and discarded. The Liberals were his partners "from 1866 until he dumped them unceremoniously in the late 1870s." Cabinet colleagues formed a group "fairly labelled as 'use and discard'." Count Pourtalès complained that party comrades were to him "just post horses with whom he travels to the next stop." "Anybody who said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing in Bismarck's opinion would finish in outer darkness." He used the courts to accuse Count Harry Arnim of treason, driving him into exile. When the Liberal leader Lasker died, he sent back the condolences of the US House of Representatives and forbade five ministers to attend the funeral: "certainly not." Steinberg "cannot recall a letter in which Bismarck apologized for anything more serious than not writing or forgetting a family birthday."
The rage was physical. He was "a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed tears." He ate half a turkey washed down with cognac, took second helpings of every course. "No statesman of the nineteenth or twentieth century fell ill so frequently, so publicly, and so dramatically," and "his colossal will to power combined with his fury at anybody... who blocked him literally made him sick and he knew it." By 1883 gluttony, rage and sleeplessness were killing him. A young doctor, Ernst Schweninger, took over his hours, his food, his drink, and his family's diet. He wrapped Bismarck in a damp roll, gave him valerian, and held his hand "like a mother with a restless child" until he slept. "From that moment, he trusted me." From 1886 Bismarck "never went above 227 pounds." Schweninger "had, in effect, saved Bismarck's life."
The Stick and the Carrot
Industrialization had produced "a new sullen, hostile working class," and two attempts on the Kaiser's life in 1878 gave Bismarck his opening. He believed socialists should lose the vote altogether: "I do not believe it possible to let citizens, legally proven to be socialists, retain the right to vote."
He did two opposite things at once. The Anti-Socialist Law passed on 19 October 1878, by 221 votes to 149, banning associations that aimed "to overthrow the existing state and social order," along with their meetings and publications. Then, working with the reformist official Theodor Lohmann, he pushed for "a state insurance system with compulsory contributions by employer and worker" instead of Lohmann's preferred Christian self-help. Steinberg's verdict: "Bismarck was right." Sickness insurance passed in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, old-age and disability insurance in 1889.
Germany got "the first modern social welfare safety net in the world," which "still forms part of the modern German social security system, a significant achievement and entirely Bismarck's doing." But the repression failed. The Social Democrats kept winning seats. Steinberg sums up the contradiction in two sentences: "He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state. He preferred to shoot workers rather than to listen to their complaints."
The Honest Broker
Abroad, the same man was a different creature. "In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless." The Russian diplomat Shuvalov once told him, "Coalitions are your nightmare." Bismarck replied: "Necessarily." Having beaten two great powers, "everything depended on inducing at least one of the two mighty foes whom we had beaten in the field to renounce the anticipated design of uniting with the other in a war of revenge." He built a league of the Three Emperors, then the Dual Alliance with Austria, the Triple Alliance with Italy, and the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia — all to "limit the range of the possible anti-German coalition by means of treaty."
In February 1878 he made his "honest broker" speech and convened the powers at Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano. Disraeli, seventy-four and unwell, found the "tall pallid man with a wasp-like waist" he had met in 1862 transformed into "an extremely stout person with a ruddy countenance." For days Bismarck puzzled the British with "a rambling amusing, egotistical autobiography" and "not a word of business."
On 21 June he called on Disraeli himself — something he never did for anyone — and floated compromises. Disraeli refused. "'Am I to understand it is an ultimatum?' 'You are.'" Bismarck invited him to dine alone with the family. Afterward they smoked and talked for an hour and a half; Disraeli believed the cigar "gave the last blow to my shattered constitution, but I felt it was absolutely necessary." "If you do not smoke under such circumstances," he wrote, "you look like a spy." By bedtime "St Petersburg had surrendered." "He is a complete despot here," Disraeli wrote. But by refusing to back Russia, "the Tsar and the court were offended."
The Folder and the Sabre
Bismarck "needed no majorities in parliament; he needed no political parties. He had a public of one." For twenty-six years he worked that single royal patron by "temper tantrums, hysteria, tears, and threats," until William I did "things that every fibre in his spare Royal Prussian frame rejected." He guarded his access to the King through a Cabinet Order of 1852 that prevented ministers from reaching the monarch without the Minister-President. He stayed away from court, dined early, and spent much of his later career at his estates, as far from Berlin as possible.
Between 1888 and 1890 the public of one changed, and the new master was the young Kaiser Wilhelm II. "Bismarck's days were numbered."
By March 1890 he was planning a deliberate crisis: an anti-socialist law so harsh the Reichstag must reject it, then a new electoral law, or even the princes withdrawing from the constitution, to end universal suffrage. Steinberg: "To stay in power he would destroy the Reich of 1870, his greatest creation."
On 12 March he received his old Catholic enemy Windthorst, plumped cushions behind his back, and asked his price. Windthorst warned him, "if you go, you won't come back. Stay in office," and left saying, "I am coming from the political deathbed of a great man." On the morning of 15 March Wilhelm II arrived unannounced. Bismarck, woken and dressed without breakfast, reported the meeting. "And you did not show him the door," said the Kaiser — and then: "you negotiate with Catholics and Jews behind my back." Bismarck retorted that soon he would have to submit his menus.
The Kaiser later described what followed: "I sat at the table, my sabre between my knees, smoking a cigar. The Chancellor stood before me and his growing anger made me calmer. Suddenly he picked up a huge folder and hurled it down on the table in front of me with a big bang. I was afraid he was going to throw an inkwell at my head. Well, I took hold of my sabre!"
Wilhelm demanded the 1852 order be rescinded. Bismarck refused and on 18 March wrote a resignation designed for publication, while his successor, Caprivi, "began work in the next room." He had told Tsar Alexander III, "I do not believe that he would ever dismiss me against my will." He had threatened resignation so often that Lasker had called it "mere pretence." This time the Kaiser simply accepted it. The ministers and the whole press accepted his fall, which showed "how little he understood" his eroded position. After it, officials "swelled out like sponges placed in water," having been "oppressed and restricted by the dominant influence of Prince Bismarck."
Bamberger wrote: "He is gone as the Great Devil who towers over his nation."
He did not go quietly. Within two weeks he had mobilized his own press corps, paying "in secrets revealed, in interviews, and in his incomparable authority," and set about the memoirs that, Steinberg shows, "twist and suppress the truth." He died in 1898. He chose as his epitaph: "A faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I."
— Otto von Bismarck to Albrecht von Roon, 1872In my trade one accumulates many enemies but no new friends, instead loses the old ones.
Part IIThe Playbook
Bismarck is the most dangerous figure to learn from in this collection, because his methods worked. He unified a nation from a minority position, without an army or a party of his own, by reading the forces around him better than anyone alive. He also lied habitually, betrayed patrons, jailed bishops, persecuted socialists, and left behind a state only he could steer. The principles below are what the record shows working — paired, where it matters, with what they cost.
The principles
- 1.Read the parallelogram of forces.
- 2.Choose allies by interest, never by sentiment.
- 3.Win the one person who matters.
- 4.Grab the weapon your enemy fears.
- 5.After victory, take only what is necessary.
- 6.Make the other side fire first.
- 7.Keep sixty-four squares open.
- 8.Alternate the carrot and the stick.
- 9.Know the cost of use-and-discard.
Principle 1
Read the parallelogram of forces
Roon, the War Minister who brought Bismarck to power, described his gift in geometric terms: "To construct the parallelogram of forces correctly and from the diagonal, that is to say, that which has already happened, then assess the nature and weight of the effective forces, which one cannot know precisely, that is the work of the historic genius who confirms that by combining it all." Steinberg's gloss: "And Bismarck did just that — 'combining it all'."
The gift rested on information: "He seems to have made it his business to know everything about everything." He could hold in his head "multiple possible moves by adversaries" across five or six great powers. And he had a modest theory of what that knowledge was for: "A statesman does not create the stream of time, he floats on it and tries to steer."
Tactic: Before acting, map every party with a stake, the direction each is already moving, and how hard. Look for the move that the existing forces will carry for you rather than the one you must push against all of them.
Principle 2
Choose allies by interest, never by sentiment
"In the policy of sentiment there is no reciprocity of any kind." Bismarck judged foreign powers "only from the harm or good that I judge them capable of doing to Prussia," and insisted that "not even the king has the right to subordinate the interests of the country to his own feelings of love or hate towards foreigners."
The rule explains his best work. It is why he could partner with Austria in 1864, fight her in 1866, spare her at Nikolsburg and ally with her in 1879. It also explains his worst. Steinberg notes that in foreign affairs he "never lost his temper"; at home he let hatred run policy, and the Kulturkampf jailed or exiled every Prussian bishop to fight a Catholic population that had never threatened the state.
Tactic: Write down why you favour or oppose each potential partner. Strike every reason that is about how you feel rather than what they can do for or against you. Then apply the same audit to your internal rivals.
Principle 3
Win the one person who matters
Bismarck "needed no majorities in parliament; he needed no political parties. He had a public of one." The train compartment outside Berlin in 1862 is the template. The King was terrified of ending on the scaffold. Bismarck did not argue policy. He reframed the fear — "Et après, Sire?" — until the King "began to assume the part of an officer fighting for kingdom and fatherland."
For twenty-six years he worked the same patron with "temper tantrums, hysteria, tears, and threats." He guarded the relationship structurally, through the 1852 Cabinet Order that kept other ministers from reaching the King without him. And that is exactly where he broke. When the patron changed, the new Kaiser demanded the order be rescinded, and Bismarck "fell because of a system that he preserved and bequeathed to the unstable young Emperor." He had threatened resignation so often that, the one time it mattered, he was taken at his word.
♟
The Public of One
How a single-patron power base rose and fell.
1862
Talks William I out of abdication; then out of dismissing him on the train from Baden-Baden.
1866
Threatens resignation to force the lenient peace at Nikolsburg; the King bites "this sour apple."
1871
William I becomes German Emperor; Bismarck governs through him for two more decades.
1888–90
The public of one changes; the young Kaiser Wilhelm II is now the patron.
1890
The Kaiser demands the 1852 order be rescinded. Bismarck resigns within days.
Tactic: If your power depends on a single sponsor, win them with framing that speaks to their identity, not just their interests. And build a second base before the sponsor changes; the gate you guard can be closed from the other side.
Principle 4
Grab the weapon your enemy fears
Bismarck was a reactionary who used democracy when it paid. In 1863, to stop the King attending a congress of princes, he "sprang the idea of universal suffrage on a startled German public," knowing the small states "feared universal suffrage more than anything else." He proposed a German parliament elected by universal suffrage to outflank Austria in 1866. He "negotiated with revolutionaries." He took up the Augustenburg claim — a cause his King disliked — because it was useful against Denmark, and dropped it the moment it stopped being useful.
It worked in the short run. In the long run, by what Steinberg calls "Burkean irony," universal suffrage produced Reichstag majorities of the Catholics and Socialists he called "enemies of the Reich," and in 1890 he was plotting to abolish the very vote he had introduced.
Tactic: Look for the tool your opponent most fears, even if it is ideologically foreign to you. But before you pick it up, ask what it will do once you no longer control it.
Principle 5
After victory, take only what is necessary
"It is a political maxim after a victory not to enquire how much you can squeeze out of your opponent, but only to consider what is politically necessary." At Nikolsburg in 1866 Bismarck faced down his King and his army to deny them provinces and a parade in Vienna. "One could hardly fatally wound those with whom later one would want and indeed have to live." He threatened to resign and contemplated the four-storey window. Austria kept her territory and became his ally thirteen years later. Steinberg calls it "his greatest moment in human and diplomatic terms."
In 1871 he did the opposite. Alsace and Lorraine were annexed, and "sixteen of the sixty-four had been blocked permanently: France would never ally with Germany." The contrast between the two peaces is the lesson.
Tactic: At the moment of maximum leverage, ask which opponent you will need as a partner later. Take what secures the outcome, and leave them a road back.
Principle 6
Make the other side fire first
On the night of the Ems telegram, Bismarck's stated goal was not war but a particular kind of war: "it is important that we should be the party attacked." Whether he altered the King's message (Steinberg) or merely cut it (Bismarck), he shaped it to be "a red rag upon the Gallic bull." France mobilized the next day and declared war five days later.
Steinberg adds a caution: evidence suggests France had already decided to fight. Bismarck's claim to have engineered it is itself part of his habit of rewriting the record — the same habit that runs from the false account of his first speech to memoirs that "twist and suppress the truth."
Tactic: If a confrontation is coming, arrange the facts so that your opponent's move is the one everyone sees first. But do not believe your own legend about how much you controlled.
Principle 7
Keep sixty-four squares open
"One could not play chess if 16 out of the 64 squares were blocked in advance." Bismarck's whole foreign policy after 1871 was an attempt to keep his options open and his enemies' options closed. Coalitions were, as Shuvalov said, his nightmare; "Necessarily," he replied. So he built the Three Emperors' League, the Dual Alliance, the Triple Alliance and the secret Reinsurance Treaty, each designed to keep a revengeful France alone.
Even so, the system depended on him; Grey's "huge battleship without a rudder" describes what was left when he went.
Tactic: Treat every relationship you permanently close off as a square removed from the board. Keep as many potential partners available as you can, and be wary of building a structure only you can operate.
Principle 8
Alternate the carrot and the stick
Steinberg calls it "the Bismarckian technique of alternating strategies — carrots and sticks." He banned the Jesuits while raising the pay of the lower Catholic clergy. He passed the Anti-Socialist Law and then built the world's first modern social insurance system — sickness in 1883, accident in 1884, old age and disability in 1889. He told Austria their relations "must become either better or worse than they now are."
The social insurance outlived him and still underpins German welfare — "a significant achievement and entirely Bismarck's doing." The stick did not work. The Social Democrats kept growing, and Bismarck's last plan was to break the constitution to stop them. "He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state."
Tactic: When you must apply pressure, pair it with a real benefit that addresses the grievance underneath. Expect the benefit to last and the pressure to fail.
Principle 9
Know the cost of use-and-discard
"As soon as the plough was in motion, I unhitched the ox." Bismarck took up allies for single tasks and dropped them: the Augustenburg claim, the Liberals, his own cabinet. Comrades were "just post horses with whom he travels to the next stop." Subordinates learned that "their achievements were always his; if something went wrong the subordinate got the blame." He could "never delegate authority" and "considered — rightly — that he was smarter than everybody else."
The method won Schleswig-Holstein and much else. But by 1890 he had "no ally left when he needed it." When the Kaiser moved against him, the ministers and the press simply accepted it.
Tactic: Keep a ledger of the people you have used and dropped. Every entry is a vote you will not have when your position is challenged.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Out-savage the savages, then take off the costume. At seventeen he won the best duelling club by insulting its leaders. He could adopt an extreme posture and shed it the moment it stopped paying.
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A great state's honour is its interest, not its romance. "The only sound basis for a large state is egoism and not romanticism."
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Tell them your plan; they won't believe you. "Take care of that man; he means what he says." Almost nobody did.
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After winning, ask what's necessary, not what you can squeeze. The Austria he spared in 1866 became his ally in 1879. The France he dismembered in 1871 never did.
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Make the other side fire first. "It is important that we should be the party attacked."
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Keep sixty-four squares open. Every permanent enemy is a square removed from the board.
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Your power is only as safe as your patron. He had a public of one for twenty-six years. Then the public changed.
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Threaten to resign often, and you'll be taken at your word once. The young Kaiser simply waited for the letter.
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Don't let hatred run the home front. The man who never lost his temper in foreign affairs jailed every Prussian bishop at home.
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Let someone hold your hand. The colossus who ate half a turkey at a sitting was saved by a doctor who took control of his diet and sat with him until he slept.
