There are few figures in European history who have more biographies than Otto von Bismarck. The authors are a “who's who” of German and European historiography: Max Lenz (1902), Erich Marcks (1915), Erich Eyck (1950), A. J. P. Taylor (1955), Otto Pflanze (two volumes, 1963, 1990), Lothar Gall (1980), Edgar Feuchtwanger (2002), et al. Likewise, most of the general histories of German unification, nineteenth-century Europe, or diplomatic history might as well be Bismarck biographies, so central is the Iron Chancellor to the story.
For that simple reason, it is easy to approach Jonathan Steinberg's new entry with skepticism. The narrative is utterly familiar. Otto loved his father and hated his mother. He was an aimless young Junker, and then not so young, fearing that life and opportunity had passed him by. The 1848 Revolution introduced him to politics and tapped wellsprings of talent that had previously gone unsuspected. He earned a reputation as the most reactionary of the reactionaries, gifted with a sharp tongue in parliamentary debate that enraged his enemies and delighted his supporters in equal measure. He was a man of the extreme right, a one-shot weapon whom King William I of Prussia could only use in an emergency: the Constitutional Crisis over army reform. The “heroic period” follows: bashing the Prussian liberals by impugning their patriotism; brilliant diplomatic preparation; wars of unification, “indemnity bills,” and victory parades—the triumph of realpolitik. And then, as every student of the era knows, the frustration of governing the Reich he had created: the rise of political Catholicism and the Social Democratic party, Kulturkampf and anti-Socialist laws, the tendency to label anyone who disagreed with him a Reichsfeind (enemy of the Reich). Even now, however, as Germany's domestic transformation proceeded apace, he still had the touch in foreign affairs: the Dual Alliance, the Three Emperors’ League, the Congress of Berlin, the Reinsurance Treaty, and all the rest. It was a bravura performance of diplomatic juggling in a very dangerous world and still dazzles after all these years (and all those biographies). Steinberg omits none of this, and indeed, there are times when this book “reads itself” when the specialist knows exactly what is coming next.
In the hands of a lesser scholar, such a book could amount to little more than a series of standard anecdotes, a relentless recounting of the life of a “great man.” Happily, Steinberg's book triumphs on three levels. First, no previous Bismarck biography has been so well researched, particularly in the primary sources of those who knew the great man. They are all here: the American diplomat and historian John Lothrop Motley; the true-blue conservative Gerlach brothers; the revolutionary-turned-bureaucrat Lothar Bucher; the paramours (and desired ones) of this passionate man, women such as Laura Russell and Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff. Steinberg not only discusses them, but he also explores their letters, diaries, and personal papers in detail. As a result, the reader enjoys a magnificent record of the tenor of the times, expressed in the words and ideas of those who knew Bismarck best.
Second, no other biography reflects such a careful reading of the secondary literature. By now, mastery of the enormous Bismarck literature can only be the product of a lifetime of reading and reflection. The result is synthesis in the classic style. Steinberg offers us Bismarck as a frightening radical, anything but a “conservative” in the traditional sense. He could lie to his own sovereign, destroy centuries-old kingdoms with the stroke of a pen, treat with revolutionaries such as Napoleon III or socialist Ferdinand LaSalle. He is, indeed, Gall's “white revolutionary.” Likewise, Steinberg's Freudian exploration of Bismarck's psyche hearkens back to Pflanze's magisterial work, and his notion that Bismarck's “charismatic” leadership poisoned the well of German liberalism and thus led at least indirectly to Hitler recalls to the reader the ideas of Eyck. Steinberg moves so smoothly through these historiographical waters that one barely notices, an impressive display of both scholarship and writing.
Finally, what of Steinberg's own thesis? In the end, after all, we want to learn something new. Here, we have perhaps the first truly post-Cold-War, and perhaps postmodern, Bismarck. The emphasis is not on ideology or impersonal structures. Rather, Steinberg gives us Bismarck as the “sovereign self,” a human persona so strongly formed and self-directed that it is able, even if only for a while, to impose its will upon history, to move it in this direction or that. Bismarck made himself, dramatized himself, and rejected the notion that he had to change for the good of the world. Rather, the world had to change for his good. In that sense, the famous story when Bismarck hears of the attempt on the Kaiser's life in 1878—he receives the news and, without even inquiring about the health of the old man, proclaims, “Now we dissolve the Reichstag”—becomes a kind of post-modern declaration of independence from party, partisanship, and platform. Bismarck, for all his words and speeches and proclamations, would have thrown his own mother overboard in the interests of his own advancement. Oh, wait—he did just that in his memoirs, as Steinberg reminds us.
There are minor problems and arguable points here. Ludwig Windthorst, the leader of the Zentrum, receives praise for clever political dissembling, zigging, and zagging, while Bismarck is criticized for what appears to be the very same tactics. On occasion, Steinberg seems to strike an unfair note, castigating novelist Theodor Fontane for failing to see how the notion of the charismatic strong man was “Bismarck's real gift to Hitler.” Fontane was the greatest Prussian literary figure of his age. He was not a prophet, political or otherwise; he was long dead by 1933; and it is hard to see how he could have judged anyone's “gift” to Hitler.
Make no mistake, however: Steinberg joins a long, honorable genealogy of Bismarck biographers, and he does so con brio.
