1705041880

1705041881 For Germany could not be subdued except by a man of emotion who, like the artist, was capable of casting his molten feelings into forms of solid iron. It was really an artist who shaped this realm of music into a state.

1705041882

1705041883 But he was also a realist; for this same soil nourishes a race of realists who attempt to balance their weakness for reverie and philosophy by a deliberate propulsion towards externals—their cult of action being, probably through fear, exaggerated into wariness. Bismarck was hard and realistic, with a keen sense of cold facts and an almost total indifference to principles. All during his thirty years of steadily mounting power, and even at the last when he was a dictator, he would ally himself with any party or any platform and oppose any party or any platform, purely as the occasion demanded. He hated passionately, lying awake far into the night. And the next day he would shatter his opponents like a bolt of lightning. But the very moment he had need of them, he would reverse his tactics and become conciliatory. It is absurd to ask just how far such a policy was pursued in the interests of his cause and how far in the interests of his personal power: for this man was a monomaniac who cared for no cause but his own and who felt that he alone could properly defend it!

1705041884

1705041885 Nevertheless Bismarck’s primum mobile was neither the will to power nor the desire for fame—as to witness his long period of aimlessness in youth. At the age of thirty-five, when Bismarck the noble was taking his first steps into politics, Napoleon the parvenu was already emperor. He did not settle upon this career through any desire to be a dictator, nor any theoretical love for a fatherland which did not yet exist, nor through pride in Prussia, his more immediate home. But when he took trowel in hand and began laying stone upon stone, he was moved by the true artist’s wish to produce order out of chaos, to give form to the formless—and along with this went a sound and thoroughgoing misanthropy which led him to ridicule the failures of his predecessors.

1705041886

1705041887 The German genius has always been either ideologist or artist. This people has never produced the pure homo politicus .

1705041888

1705041889 For this reason he was all the more violent in his opposition to the ideologists. He had little enough respect for philosophy, but he positively despised the pedants of the Frankfort variety, who had insisted, while the country ran riot, on examining in the light of ultimate philosophical principles every proposition laid before the assembly. A landowner from the Pomeranian back-country, he placed a low value on city-bred intellectuals and professional men. He was self-taught, a political primitive; he stepped abruptly into the arena without previous experience or training, and also, of course, without party prejudices. Stammeringly, he hurled his doctrine of German unity at the astonished ranks of the diet until the king had singled him out. What could attract a sickly dreamer like Frederick William to this uncouth giant except that obscure element above and beyond the intellect which they had in common? Did this stranger arrive from his provincial estate with a fully worked-out plan of action? On the contrary, he had nothing but the vaguest notion of what he wanted, nothing but courage and the mutterings of anger.

1705041890

1705041891 For there was heavy cargo of courage in this powerful hulk: a proud self-consciousness formed the ballast for a vessel shaken with antinomies, and this alone assured it of a voyage without mishap. Bismarck’s first word to a king was a rebuke, as was also his last: March ‘48, March ‘9o. When not fighting, he was hardly more than a misanthrope and a scoffer: his great energies were drained by doubt, cynicism, and melancholy. But the presence of an enemy restored them to unity, converted them into action and purpose, and gave him self-reliance by providing an external force against which his self-reliance could be directed. And the nearer an enemy, the keener his capacity for action. He fought with a deeper devotion in domestic issues than against a foreign foe. Bismarck hated the German politicians Windhorst and Richter, but not Napoleon.

1705041892

1705041893 At bottom Bismarck was a thorough revolutionary. His first appearance as he came out of the oak forests of his birthplace and threw himself with fury into the narrow machinations of party politics; his attitude towards the kings and princes of his own country, and later towards foreign kings and emperors;the bold and simple “No” which he hurled at the political maxims of his times; his insistence upon ruling without interference from others; his continual threat of resigning; the splendid clarity, informality, and newness of his diction—all these defiant traits of a freedom-loving temperament belong to a man who, had he been born of the submerged classes, would have advanced behind the red flag.

1705041894

1705041895 He was not like Goethe who needed order to encompass his own chaos: he was disharmonic through and through, neither resting nor wanting rest. For it is not ideas, but emotions, which make the revolutionary; and the man who champions tradition with a fresh and terrorizing passionateness is often more revolutionary than a man who fights tradition with a calm pen or among the ranks of the many.

1705041896

1705041897 In reality, Bismarck created a new form of politics, in Germany at least. He revolutionized the methods of dealing with popular rebellions, founded the new school of diplomatic practice which openly struck terror instead of employing flattery and craft as in the school of Metternich. After a dinner in London, when he had outlined his program with astounding firmness, Disraeli, who saw him in the true perspective, said to his guests: “Take care of that man, he means what he says.”

1705041898

1705041899 With these strong impulses to break the bonds of custom, with so much courage and self-reliance, such forcefulness, and scorn—what kept him faithful to the old forms? What led him to decide socially against the future? What linked him with dynasties which had already begun to lose their meaning?

1705041900

1705041901 His blood. When he was being trained in the hunt, the old woodsman whose great-grandfather had served a Bismarck in the time of young Freddy called the boy “Herr Junker.” He saw the inadequacy of his class, their degeneration and idleness, the futility and mismanagement with which many of his cousins fulfilled their inherited offices; and he saw the intelligence, industry, and pride of common citizens triumph over the mummified prejudices of the nobility—yet he constituted himself the guardian of his class and summoned his genius to its defense.

1705041902

1705041903 Above all else he defended the king. Not that he considered the king’s blood to be better than his own: for more than once he told the Hohenzollerns to their faces that the Bismarcks had tenanted the realm longer than they. But he saw in the king the apex of a pyramid which, if truncated, would seen odd, and perhaps even ludicrous. He was unwilling to imperil the hereditary prerogatives of his name; like the usual noble, the usual landowner, he was loath to relinquish any worldly possessions for theoretical reasons; he could never divorce himself from this sense of superiority which found its sanction in the very force of character behind it—and thus he gave unto the king that which was the king’s.

1705041904

1705041905 For his house still flourished with manly vigor; the nihilism of an age of increasing transvaluations had not yet broken through his feudalistic code; and tradition was still powerful enough to extend its influence when aided by so faithful a scion. It seems as though this Junker inherited absolutely nothing from his mother, he was so totally lacking in any evidence of her bourgeois blood. Fifty years later—and Bismarck, with his temperament and will power, his fearlessness and independence, would have been a leader of the new era.

1705041906

1705041907 Thus he remained all his life a royalist, and grounded his work on dynasties. He himself asserted that his loyalty to the king was purely the result of his faith in God, yet this faith was forced to take strange shapes. He was a Protestant, highly unmystical, inveterately rationalistic. For years, up to the day of his death, he kept a prayer book lying on his night table; it was interleaved with blank sheets on which he jotted down the political ideas that came to him at night: truly a Bismarckian species of devotion.

1705041908

1705041909 In any case, no such transcendental reasons prompted him to show the least respect for other princes, and especially other German ones, even though they too felt that they ruled by divine right. On the contrary, he was scornful and heaped irony upon their heads. In the whole line of Prussian kings he loved no one, not even the great Frederick—and he cared still less for the rulers under which he himself had served. But he was bound to them by a feeling for feudal ties which must have been handed down through many generations, since blood alone can explain it. The noble granted fealty to his king through expecting fealty of his vassals. So great was the love of freedom in this revolutionary temperament.

1705041910

1705041911 The relationship always remained essentially one of equal to equal. And while he always observed the formalities, singing himself “most humbly” or “most obediently,” he eyed the conduct of his master with suspicion and bit the golden chain when he felt its pressure.

1705041912

1705041913 At last he even bit the master’s hand—and nothing shows Bismarck’s latent revolutionary tendencies more clearly than the way he rose up at the first provocation against the one authority he had recognized, the king. The significant fact is not his going, but his way of going: every detail of this drama, in which a powerful old man was called upon to comply with the arbitrary wishes of a weak young sovereign, points to the imperiousness, the intransigence, and the thorough independence of his character. The hereditary nobility of his blood provided a rigid code which would not permit him to conceive of his work in terms of the German people rather than in terms of Prussian kings. But nothing, not even the faith he paraded so readily, could hinder another kind of nobility, the nobility of his temperament, from defying a prince by God’s grace exactly as the young idiot deserved.

1705041914

1705041915 At times in the past he had ventured cautious criticisms or had, though always with the bearing of the liegeman, openly voiced objections when behind closed doors. But now, aroused like a mastiff, he broke into a rage against the master who had struck him unjustly. Bismarck’s fall disclosed impulses which his inherited code had kept concealed for years. Only the lack of a great opponent, and the legend which the Germans built up around the mere pretext of a reconciliation, have been able to obscure for a time the violence of this outburst.

1705041916

1705041917 Yet even now he winced at the thought of open rebellion. Was youth all that this old man of seventy-five needed? Or were his royalist leanings still an unsurmountable obstacle? In any case, he did not go beyond farewell tirades in which he fired disturbing truths point-blank at his king and the other princes. Then he retired in fury to his den, hurling out stones which crackled the dilapidated royal masonry.

1705041918

1705041919 But the steel edifice of the state remained standing. For twenty-eight years Bismarck had governed; twenty-eight years after he was gone, the old dynastic system collapsed—and Germany’s enemies watched to see the entire structure fall into ruins.

1705041920

1705041921 But it held! Not a stone, except those which the enemy extracted, was loosened. Indeed, at the very height of calamity, skilful hands were at work making the pillars more solid than before. And it now became evident that whereas most Germans had revered the royalty as the very foundation of the empire, it had been merely a brilliant but unnecessary facade.

1705041922

1705041923 The survival of the state is the surest evidence that the important part which Bismarck assigned to royalty in his political scheme was purely a concession to his class—one might almost call it a weakness. For as the ruling houses fell and the empire endured, Bismarck’s precautions for the future, despite all this baggage of tradition, were justified by their results. After the tempest, people looked about them and saw that the man who had done this was much more modern than he himself had ever hoped to be.

1705041924

1705041925 When the empire was founded at Versailles, amidst the medieval roar of victorious cannon, the golden mirrors in the Glass Gallery of the palace reflected only the forms of warlike princes; the industrious masses were elsewhere. When in the same hall forty-eight years later the empire was sentenced to atone and pay for its defeat, the golden mirrors no longer reflected a single royal figure. The last three emperors of Europe had been slain or deposed. Twenty-two German dynasties had been deprived of power—not by compulsion from without, hardly even by the natives themselves, but by corrosion, by the rust of an era which had served its purposes and was now ready for death.

1705041926

1705041927 Yet the documents which two humble citizens were called upon to sign at that momentous hour did not involve the destruction of Bismarck’s work, but only of the work of William the Second. It was William who had fostered, and Bismarck who had opposed, all those policies which eventually involved Germany in war. Foreign colonies and a marine were typical instances of all that the founder of the state had not wanted. Had he really raised the empire on the point of a victorious sword? Or had he not, rather, employed the sword purely as a means of overcoming Europe’s resistance to German unity? Did he not for twenty years thereafter, resist all the temptations of imperialism, all the enticements of militaristic expansion? And was it not Bismarck who, braving the anger of the king and all the generals at Nikolsburg, created the prototype of a modern peace: without cession of territory, without indemnity, dictated solely by the desire to restore friendly relations with the enemy as quickly as possible? Was Bismarck really of the past?

1705041928

1705041929 At the end he broods, despite protestations of homage, alone and in exile. When he is nearly eighty, and people try to argue him into the tranquillity proper to his years, he looks at them from under his bushy eyebrows and asks, “And why should I be tranquil?” The wife is gone upon whom he had lavished all the warmth which he repressed in his frigid dealings with the outer world. This woman had been his haven of retreat. All the yearnings for quiet, woodland and home which troubled this restless, knotty character were embodied in her—even though his equally strong love of executive activity and political organization always kept him occupied in the service of the state. The more turbulent his career, the more peaceful his marriage had to be—and was.

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