A Few Thoughts on ‘Bismarck’ by John Steinberg
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bismarck-Life-Jonathan-Steinberg/dp/0199642427
I recently read a biography of Otto von Bismarck by John Steinberg. The book does an excellent job at what it sets out to do: describe how Bismarck exercised power on people. We begin with a 19 year old Bismarck strolling around his college town challenging strangers to duels, and end with an elderly Bismarck leaking secret international treaties to the press purely to cause trouble for his enemies. Everything that happens in between forms the bulk of the book. It’s a great read and I’d love to talk about it with people. Some impressions below.
Domination is the overarching theme of Steinberg’s model of Bismarck. The book describes Bismarck as having an enormous will to power, and a total lack of moral principles. When he got power, he used it to preserve and expand his position and in the process, or by necessity, reshaped Europe. He was incredibly capable as a politician and diplomat and engineered scenarios on a European scale that few other people even thought possible, and even fewer imagined he could emerge victorious from. He didn’t seem to have a positive vision for what a thriving Prussia, Germany or Europe should look like, except that Prussia needed to be secure in order to secure his own position! The same applied to the Prussian King that Bismarck reported to, King William I. Bismarck spent much of his career preventing various opposing forces from diluting his King’s authority, which at the same time allowed Bismarck to maintain his own authority. As long as the King’s role was secure, and Bismarck was on good terms with the King, Bismarck ruled.
Bismarck Himself
Bismarck’s name pops up every so often, but before reading the book I had little knowledge of him beyond a few blurry facts: I knew he unified Germany, that he may have been a general, and at some point he was replaced by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor and/or King of Germany. Dominic Cummings mentioned Bismarck as being very capable and complex in a recent Substack, and this piqued my interest in him. Cummings also said Steinberg’s biography is brilliant, so I bought it. Good recommendation, good decision.
What did the man actually do? He was born into a noble Prussian family in 1815, went to university, failed to get a post as a diplomat, wrangled one anyways, got bored, tried to dodge military service, did the bare minimum military service, got fed up with his civil service job and became a lonely farmer on his family estate for 5 years in his 20s. He then tried a civil service job again, got fed up after a few weeks, quit and got involved in local politics. His first success came quickly and he was soon sent to a national assembly where he immediately gained notoriety, an elite network and proximity to power, which included regular meetings with royalty. In 1862, following 15 years as a senior civil servant, King William I placed Bismarck in the top Prussian job as Minister-President and over the following 10 years he engineered the defeat of Denmark, Austria & France in separate wars, the unification of Germany and he presided over German politics as a de facto despot until 1890, 20 years after unification. In that time, Prussia emerged as a major industrial, military and economic power.
Bismarck strikes me as much closer to many modern political figures than his contemporaries in that he operated according to his own self interest instead of hewing to a fixed set of principles or ideologies. As an example, Bismarck’s political career was accelerated by a group of eminent, devout Christians. He used their support for his own gain and adhered to their principles as long as he needed their support. Once he was powerful enough to do without their support, he had no issues with negotiating with Liberals, Socialists, Catholics - all abhorrent to his early patrons. He was a practitioner of realpolitik.
A fun story from Bismarck’s mid 20s, when he was managing his estate in isolated Pomerania: Two fellow nobles visited and were well entertained by Bismarck, with plenty of food, drink and charming conversation. They agreed with Bismarck to depart early the next morning, but decided to sleep in after heading to bed too late. At the agreed-upon time, Bismarck knocked on the door. Hearing no response he attempted to enter, only to find the door blocked. He figured his friends were dodging the deal. The next thing the two friends heard was Bismarck shouting from outside and when the friends still did not come out, they received two gunshots to the window in their room. They quickly waved a white rag out the window and eventually got on with the day as planned. Bismarck was known as the ‘Mad Junker’ because of these sort of antics. The same man was eventually the most powerful man in Germany, and one of the most powerful in Europe!
Prussia and Europe in the 1800s
You might be confused by the word ‘Prussia’. It’s often mentioned in European history, but rarely explained. ‘Austria’ is a similar but much less mysterious word, though ‘Austro-Hungarian Empire’ is impressive. Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czechoslovakia, Prussia was a European state, but it no longer exists today, having been absorbed and distributed into modern day nations. This is partly because the Allies decreed Prussia null and void after WW2, but also because much effort had already gone into destroying Prussia by the time the Allies announced it dead. In the early 1800s, Prussia was a weak neighbour of the Austrian Empire, but by 1890 it was one of the most powerful European states, with booming population, industry and military.
Some more basic history I learned from the book: Europe’s internal borders have changed a lot over the past few centuries. The complexity of European politics at this time astounded me. There are so many states, battles, transfers of territory, and treaties that I’d never heard of. It was hard to keep track of them all. In Bismarck’s case he was a Prussian noble, which meant he was also German, since Prussia was German. However, Germany at the time, was only a very loose federation made up of kingdoms, small states, free cities and other odd entities that were largely autonomous and rarely cohesive. Members of the federation often got into spats and risked being traded to France by a more powerful coalition or member, i.e. Austria or Prussia. Up until Bismarck’s time, Austria was the dominant member of the federation, with Prussia being the underdog. Bismarck’s great success was in achieving Prussian dominance over Austria, followed by the unification of all German entities into an empire dominated by Prussia, and Bismarck himself.
One of my favourite aspects of the book is seeing the emergence of major ideas, norms, and institutions that we take for granted today, like free markets and trade, constitutions, and even the labels ‘Conservative’, ‘Liberal’, ‘Socialist’. This is the emergence of Liberal Democracy in Europe and much of the language and ideas that define today’s politics follow from it. Everything that Steinberg wrote about on these topics I found interesting. Compared to the West today, Europe of the 1850s looks surprisingly backward! Many states are ruled by absolute monarchs, elected parliaments are controversial, and free trade, enterprise, and money/capitalism were controversial. The main characteristics of European politics today - democracy, markets, liberalism - are barely 200 years old, and have been mainstream for only about 100 years.
The core conflict that Bismarck dealt with was that of absolute monarchy vs constitutional monarchy — constitutional being the one that caused a threat to Bismarck’s position by attempting to restrain his King’s authority. I’d heard before that monarchs were said to have a divine mandate, but I didn’t grasp what that meant in practise. The King of Prussia’s role as ruler was a God-given, natural, and immutable property of reality. In theory, the King did not have to justify himself to anybody and a good Prussian citizen supported the King’s authority. This was the case for most European monarchies in the 1800s, including the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians. In contrast, the English Royalty had ceded some of their power by this time, sharing it with the English Parliament.
As such, the introduction of a Constitution was one of the major political issues of 1800s Prussia, and something that many people thought abhorrent, impractical and unnecessary! This was very surprising to me, though if I listened to Machiavelli I would have probably felt less so. Around this time, the idea of Capitalism was being debated, promoted, obstructed and tied up with questions around Constitutionalism. Various people thought it inconceivable to alter the natural order of things by having a piece of paper disrupt the King’s covenant with the Almighty. Many of the King’s supporters were ‘Junker’ aristocrats with large estates, and the idea that an arbitrary citizen, God forbid a Jew, could buy an estate without being of noble birth was very upsetting to them. I imagine this protection of the status quo encouraged many of the King’s supporters to also support restrictions on trade and enterprise.
To cover Bismarck is to cover the history of Prussia and Germany across the period 1848 - 1890, which is a lot. As a result, and perhaps due to a lack of material in some cases, a number of major events don’t get much detailed description. For instance, Bismarck’s first political campaign gets only a few lines in the book. This seems like a lost opportunity, since it was his first substantial piece of political work. I had hoped that more details would reveal Bismarck’s early successes, mistakes, and shortcomings that he learned to mitigate. Similarly, events that don’t directly relate to Bismarck’s work and personality get little airtime.The battles in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars are a good example — they were critical to German unification and yet get very little attention paid in the book. Similar story with the capture of Napoleon III by Prussia in 1870.
How the Biography Works
Two aspects of Steinberg’s approach stand out to me, and I think they contrast his book with any other possible biography of Bismarck. One, he focuses very closely on Bismarck’s personality and how he exercised power on people around him. Two, Steinberg presents a lot of writing from Bismarck and contemporary sources and bases his analysis almost exclusively on these. The result is a biography laden with letters, memos, memoirs and excellent, nuanced commentary by Steinberg. In other biographies, like Caro’s books on LBJ, there’s quite a lot of visual imagery presented. This is almost completely absent here. I didn’t notice until finishing the book, but many of the major events in Bismarck’s life whizzed by and didn’t leave much of an impact on me, the reader. I know they happened, but I just remember them as dull facts rather than vivid scenes. For instance, despite a lot of explaining by Steinberg to show that Bismarck was an unusual choice for Minister-President, and that it was a tense time, his accession to the role of Minister-President seems to just… happen. It was also hard to reconstruct Bismarck’s emotional state over the course of these events.
I like biographies in part because I find it fascinating to learn how the subject figures things out and how their thinking evolves over time. How does Steve Jobs go from impulsive, drop-out startup founder to a mature CEO of a public company? In general, how do people who did great things develop their worldview over their life and career? I think it’s rare for a biography to expose this, probably because it’s much easier to write about what a person said & did than how their particular genius worked and how it developed. JS does a decent job at communicating Bismarck’s thinking, but frequently falls into the trap of presenting Bismarck’s strategy as a finished product. When Bismarck negotiated the acceptance of the German Constitution, I would have liked to have learned how he went about drafting it, and how he made pivotal decisions. Or how exactly, tactically, did he prevent Napoleon III from interfering with the Danish or Austrian wars? JS briefly explains that Bismarck kept Napoleon III from taking action by promising him one thing and then informing him that the King was going to oppose it. That’s good to know, but I’d have loved to understand these exchanges in details, and see his writing deconstructed. The same goes for his political campaigns and control over parliaments, ministries and the Army.
There’s plenty more in the book. If you have other thoughts, or feedback on the above, I’d appreciate you letting me know.