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Otto von Bismarck: life of the week
00:43:33
Katja Hoyer discusses the remarkable life of the 'Iron Chancellor' who masterminded the unification of Germany
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- [00:00]
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Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. Few 19th century leaders have a CV quite like Otto von Bismarck's. This formidable statesman's cunning charisma and eye for an opportunity helped him drive the unification of Germany and engineer a stunning defeat of France in 1871. Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, historian Katja Heuer introduces a man whose rise would change the face of European geopolitics forever.
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Spencer Nissen
Katya, thank you very much for joining us. We're here today to talk about Otto von Bismarck. I wonder if I could start by asking you to give our listeners a really quick introduction to Bismarck. Who was he in a nutshell?
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Katja Hoyer
So Otto von Bismarck was the first German chancellor, really, when Germany was first founded as a nation state for the very first time in 1871. He was kind of the first person to run that state as chancellor and head of the government. And he stayed in power for quite a long time. So really the first two decades of what Germany is, how it was founded, how it was set up, are down to this man, which is why he's such a significant figure really, not just within the 19th century, but with his legacy having some ramific really to this day.
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Spencer Nissen
And could you tell us a little bit about his early life? I mean, how did his formative experiences go on to shape him as a man, as a leader and as a politician?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, Bismarck lived pretty much through the whole of the 19th century and with it was, you know, shaped by most of the experiences that kind of came with it. So he was born in 1815 and that was the year that Napoleon was beaten for good. And so his really his early travelers experiences were stories being told about the nature of the Napoleonic invasions into Germany and the way that Germans were treated by Napoleon and the way that they then all rallied together to fight back. And so these kind of stories of nationalism, of perhaps, you know, kind of overflowery heroicism that kind of colored these stories, they really determine and shape the way that he grows up and the way that his childhood develops. Other than that, he's the second son of a sort minor aristocratic families. So that means he's not automatically going to take over the landed estate. And so he goes through this whole phase as a young man where he's got quite a wild youth really, because he goes, you know, through several jobs, doesn't really know what to do with himself. Bit of an identity crisis going on there as well. Tries all sorts of things, gambles, womanizes, gets into lots of sword fights. He's actually called the crazy Junker at some point, Junker being sort of the term for Prussian landed aristocracy because of his behavior being so w. And then eventually he makes his way into politics and finds his calling. And that is the moment where he says to his wife, this is it. I love the intrigue, the backstabbing behind the, you know, closed doors, all of the kind of dirty business of politics. And he's found his calling at that moment.
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Spencer Nissen
Okay, so just to give our listeners a bit of context here, can you paint a picture of the political makeup of what we now call Germany? When Bismarck first came to prominence?
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Why?
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Spencer Nissen
What did Germany or what we now call Germany look like?
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Katja Hoyer
So when Bismarck was born in 1815, Germany had only been made into a slightly smaller array of lots of different states, but it still wasn't a unified country. This was so before the Napoleonic wars, you had over 400 little states and principalities and little just kind of entities, political entities, kingdoms and so on in the area that is now Germany. Then Napoleon conquered a lot of that territory and decided that this is all too messy to run. And so he basically unified it into just dozens of states. And then effectively in Bismarck's lifetime, cause became more and more fervent for one unified nation state to come into being. And this was partially for cultural reasons. So people were saying, look, we've got the same language, we read our, you know, children the same fairy tales. Brothers Grimm played a big role in that kind of trying to unify the way that people kind of grew up in the morals that they were telling their children. And then also economic reasons. So there were plenty of kind of new, the new middle classes, industrialists and so on, who wanted to have a more unified market in which they could move people and goods around. And they were suddenly calling for a more integrated thing. And then eventually you had three wars that unified Germany, some of which Bismarck instigated. And where Bismarck comes in is that he became a member of the Prussian parliament in the kingdom of Prussia, which is one of these German states, and eventually emerged as the most powerful one which, which had Berlin as its capital. And then eventually in 1962, he became the prime minister of Prussia of that state. And effectively in that role, he became the leading figure to unify Germany. And Germany became an entity in 1871 as a unified nation state. Actually on the back, this is important on the back of defeating France in the so called Franco Prussian war, which was a war that Bismarck sort of provoked. And that's how you basically came up with that state. And that's the role that Bismarck played in that process.
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Spencer Nissen
So just to drill down a little bit more into sort of like the political makeup of Germany, you mentioned Prussia. There was that the most powerful kingdom when Bismarck was rising to power, were there quite a lot of rivals for the tag of being the most powerful German entity?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, Prussia's main rival was Austria, which had previously been a large and powerful kingdom. Basically formed a union with Hungary as the Austro Hungarian Empire and was much, much older as a political player in central Europe than Prussia had been, which is kind of Prussia's the upstart, if you will. And Austria was the all powerful central European power. And the problem, I think that people underestimated at the time was that when the Napoleonic wars were finished, people decided to give Prussia sort of a reward for the role that it had played. And Prussia basically got areas in western Germany that we now know as the Ruhr region and that is actually very rich in coal and iron ore. And nobody kind of, I think, anticipated at the time that those were the very ingredients for an industrial revolution. And so giving that, basically handing it to Prussia meant that Prussia was getting a huge advantage in the 19th century over Austria, which remained largely kind of a traditional agricultural land. Meant the two kind of existed side by side, kind of as the old model and the new model really. And eventually Prussia pressed ahead and became the most powerful and the wealthiest of the German states and really wielded that power and pushed its weight around militarily.
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Spencer Nissen
And so Bismarck, as a politician of Prussia, he was able to harness that power, was he, for his own advantage?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, people sometimes think Bismarck was a nationalist because he was the driving force behind the unification of Germany as a national state. So nationalism in the actual sense of the word. But he wasn't really what he was interested in was an extension of Prussian power. And he basically assumed that if Prussia was the leading force behind a German unification, then effectively the rest of that German state could function as an extension of Russian power. And this is why he was basically working towards that. So as the prime minister of Prussia, he was in a position to bully some of the other states, convince some of them that it was a good idea to join this kind of winning model that Prussia had found, but also use military conquest to extend Prussian territory quite aggressively as well. And being the leader of Prussia effectively gave him the means to do that.
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Spencer Nissen
How would you describe his politics? Was he generally autocratic in his leanings?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, I would say, I mean, the term realpolitik often goes back to Bismarck as the archetypical kind of example of that, in the sense that he just did what he presumed was necessary to stay in power and for Prussia to become more powerful. And so Whatever that meant got done. Whether that meant introducing a degree of democracy, which he did in Prussia and then later in Germany as well, because you realize that there were some very, very powerful revolutionary movements going on and he had to pacify people. So there was an element of democracy. But that didn't mean that he believed in democracy as a kind of morally or kind of, you know, just a better model really. It just meant that he accepted that this was necessary at that point to not provoke another revolution as Europe had seen in 1848 and 1849. On the flip side, what he was interested in is preserving the power of the old elites as much as possible. And that basically meant in some ways giving in, but also in some ways sort of suppressing the people. And the state that he created out of those beliefs was, I would say, a half democracy, half autocratic state, because it had elements of both of these things.
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Spencer Nissen
Now I'm going to try and get a feel for what kind of the person Bismarck was. You mentioned earlier that he was quite wild in his younger days and he enjoyed the skullduggery of the political arena. What did the people who came into contact with him on a daily basis, what did they make of him?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, they were universally fascinated with him. So both as enemies and as friends, he did have that sort of awful about him that made him stand out. He also physically stood out. He was very, very tall, nearly 2 meters. I don't know what that is in 14 inches, but very tall man, really heavy set as well. So really a bear of a man. People often describe his eyes, which had sort of like a icy blue of. People often say sort of stare to them that some of his adversaries found quite intimidating. But they could also have a humorous sort of twinkle in them. But he was a very, very distinctive figure physically and in terms of his character. And the other characteristic that stood out to people is just how good he was with words. So you see that in his early school reports as a kid. Teachers are pointing that out. But also later on, he spends ages writing his own speeches and then delivering them exactly in the tone and in the choice of words and register that he sees fit, depending on the situation. So this can sometimes mean bullying parliament. So there are all of these contemporary caricatures of cartoons of ways of standing there in Parliament with a whip in his hand. Or he'd sometimes wear uniform, military uniform, to sort of make a point going into a civilian parliament. At other times he just burst into tears and, you know, kind of pretend that an issue was so Emotional to him that, that he just had this emotional outbreak about it. And then the nuclear option was to threaten to resign. He did that when he absolutely felt the need to because he'd made himself completely indispensable having come up with a system that was tailor made around him. And the Kaiser in particular was absolutely terrified about what would happen if Bismarck left and Kaiser Wilhelm was left to sort of run the country or had to appoint a new chancellor. So he had a very wide register of options in which he could make his will into a political reality.
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Spencer Nissen
And you said earlier that he was a bit of a tear away when he was younger, if you've got any examples you can give us of that. And then did it ever sort of land him in hot water?
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah, I mean he was incredibly impulsive. So examples of that are the duels that he either challenged or accepted. So there's one example of him where he's actually in the Prussian parliament debating with one of his adversaries and he provokes him effectively by insulting his mother. It's a classic that worked in the 19th century as much as now. And the other deputy basically responded by challenging Bismarck to a duel. Bismarck accepts that and then actually refuses to sort the meta out in a more civilized fashion because the other guy doesn't really want to meet at dawn and fire pistols and potentially get killed, which was still very much a thing in the 19th century. People did actually still die in duels. Bismarck says no, he's not having that. But the only concession that he makes is basically go down to one shot rather than four. Then the two of them do actually meet in a field at dawn with the referee, walk the agreed amount of steps and fire their shots and both of them miss and both survive. But Bismarck had taken this incredible seriously. I mean, his wife was pregnant at the time. He left a letter with a friend to her kind of saying, well, I died in a duel. If you read this letter, just so you know you'll be looked after. And he'd made arrangements to make sure that she was kind of financially cared for and that a friend would sort of sort her affairs out. But he'd fully accepted that he might die in a duel that came about by the fact that he insulted somebody's mother in public. And that's kind of, you know, how impulsive he could be at times.
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Spencer Nissen
Okay. There's obviously a number of defining moments in Bismarck's life and one of them certainly appears to have been the second Schleswig War in 1864. What was this? Fought over and why did this turn out to be such an important episode in Bismarck's career?
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Katja Hoyer
Well, it's a famously complicated conflict between basically Denmark and some of the German states over territory in what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark, Schleswig and Holstein, two states or two territories. And there was a very complicated arrangement in place as to who rules over what and in what personal union. And nationalism was beginning to be a thing everywhere, including in Denmark as well. And there were basically calls to get some of that territory as part of Denmark, even though this complicated arrangement was in place. And Bismarck was using that very cleverly in terms of just waiting for that to escalate. And when the Danish king foolishly said, oh, I'll have a bit of that territory now, there was an immediate kind of nationalist frenzy being whipped up in the German states at the same time. And Austria and Prussia, those two rivals actually normally suddenly found they were on the same page with something and stepped in there and fought a war against Denmark, which Denmark had no chance of winning and lost very, very quickly. And that was one of the three wars of unification, basically, that made Germans realize that they actually didn't feel that they were part of the same people, country, nation, if you will, when it was against somebody else who was obviously not them, so somebody who spoke a language or had a culture that was very obviously not German, then in that case, suddenly you had Austrians and Prussians feeling that they're somehow part of the same culture, which otherwise, you know, when they were rivals, wouldn't have united them in any shape or form. And Bismarck realized that that is quite a powerful leverage to get Germans to sort of rally together and work together.
- [17:06]
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Spencer Nissen
Like I said, there's three wars of unification so you've got the second Schleswig War. We need to talk about the Franco Prussian War in a second. But what was the second war you mentioned?
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Katja Hoyer
So once this war in Denmark was won, there were some arguments between Prussia and Austria over who exactly stations troops in which of these territories that they just won in that war against Denmark. And that escalates quite quickly again because Bismarck is perfectly happy for it to escalate when he basically thinks that this might sort out the Prussian Austrian rivalry and eventually, effectively it ends up in Austria declaring war on Prussia and Prussia fighting that war again. Austria has no chance for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Basically Prussia is now a much, much more industrialized country with a very well organized military and Austria loses that war in a matter of weeks. And again, it then signals to the smaller German states that if there were some sort of unification, Prussia is the better option for them because it's clearly the winner at this point. So if you're a smaller state, smaller German state, and you're not entirely sure where your allegiances lie at this point, it's very obvious that they should lie with Prussia because it's in your own interests. And Prussia then uses this moment of military victory and both the intimidation and the admiration that that caus with smaller states to annex some of them quite ruthlessly at that point. And this means it can now bridge the territory that it won in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1815, it won that western territory that I was talking about earlier. And there was a gap basically between that and its heartlands in the northeast. And it was managing after the war against Austria to close that gap by annexing the smaller countries in between. So at this point now the whole of the north of Germany is under oppression led union.
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Spencer Nissen
And then of course, as I mentioned before, there was a Franco Prussian war which is one of the Most significant conflicts of the second half of the 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about this war, what it did for the cause for German unification? And also can you talk about how Bismarck's, I suppose you could describe it as political chicanery, how that acted as a fuel to igniting the war?
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah. So with Bismarck basically growing up really in the wake of German French animosity, so him being born in 1815 when Napoleon had just been beaten, he realized that that is kind of a, you know, really the strongest lever if you want to get Germans together fighting against France. It'll trigger all these memories even with people who aren't there. I mean we still have cultural memory today of stuff that happened say in the 50s or 60s because our parents, grandparents bring that with them. And that, you know, imagine that kind of being the backdrop to the culture at the time, the Napoleonic wars and the idea that Germans were losing those when they weren't united. Because when Napoleon was basically able to pick German states off one by one, bribe some of them, defeat some of them, but it's, it was the disunity that allowed him to do that. And then when they were all fighting together in a coalition against the French, then they were winning. And that sort of spirit Bismarck is able to harness. And there were various moments in the history in between. For instance in the 1840s there was a so called war scare where the French were basically saber rattling against the Germans. And again the amount of animosity that that caused across the German lands was interesting. And Bismarck was watching that, you know, keenly kind of growing up in that time and being a young man in that time, realizing that that nationalist fervor when you're being attacked is very useful and politically potent. But that basically required the French to attack. It would not have worked if say Prussia had said okay, let's just go and attack France because then Bavaria would have had absolutely no reason to say let's join the Prussians in this fight because it's not their fight. They would just say it's the Prussians grabbing land effectively. But that attacking moment, suddenly you're defending your people, that's the powerful thing. And so Bismarck is trying to find a way of provoking the French into starting a war with Prussia so that he can then use that moment of nationalism to unify German. Not easy because the French know perfectly well and are quite frightened of the idea that there are a lot more Germans in total than there are French. They've basically got this thing or this idea that everything that they have one of people, money, resources, whatever. The German lands have got two of the same thing and they know that. So basically it's not a great situation for them to be in. So it takes quite a little bit of manufacturing that situation. And so what Bismarck effectively does is he uses a political crisis that is already going on in France. The French emperor Napoleon, Napoleon III is under a lot of internal pressure and basically he needs to prove a point to the French people and he's trying to whip up really nationalism himself to try and unify the French people and the best way to do that on their side of the Rhine there's the same thing really provoking some sort of conflict with external parties, ideally the Germans. And so Bismarck's basically spark if you will on that whole powder keg is that he manipulates a telegram that the Prussian king sends to the French emperor in that he just sharpens the wording a lot and basically makes it look as though diplomatic protocol hasn't been adhered to. The French ambassador was supposedly rudely dismissed even though that wasn't true. And in order to make sure that cooler heads don't prevail he actually sends that telegram to the French press at the same time so that it gets. So basically a modern day leak, we'd call it a leak today but he engineers that leak very carefully, gives it over to the French press and he does that on Bastille Day, sort of the French national day. There's no way out of that for the French king, already beleaguered under so much pressure, looking weak, you know, he has to respond to that and effectively it's the equivalent to throwing your glove down and declaring a duel. It's that sort of situation that he's provoked on a national stage. And so the French do indeed declare war on Prussia. That does cause exactly what Bismarck had anticipated, namely that the other German states say that's outrageous, how dare the French do this again to us. And it brings all of this Napoleonic tension back. It doesn't help that the French emperors once again called Napoleon iii. And in that respect obviously you know, that helps with this whole nationalist fervour. And Bismarck's achieved exactly what he wanted to.
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Spencer Nissen
So what follows is a rapid and spectacular victory for Bismarck's forces. How did this victory over the French transform Bismarck's stature across not not just the German states but Europe more widely? Was this kind of his moment of greatest power?
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah, I mean as you say the victory was very quick and rapid and spectacular. So we're really only talking A few months from sort of September 1870, and really by December, it's done and the German Empire is being declared January 1871. So, because this was so quick and so successful, Bismarck wasn't a military man. People often think that, but he wasn't. So it's not his sort of military expertise or his thinking or his sort of generalship that impressed people. It's the political daring. The fact that he'd effectively announced that he was going to unite Germany by blood and iron, as he put it in a speech to liberal parliamentarians, I should add. So nationalism was actually quite a liberal idea in the 19th century. The idea was that you'd have a nation state of a construct, a constitution that would bind everyone to the law, including the king or the monarch. And so that, you know, was actually liberal idea. And Bismarck was saying in 1862 to Liberal parliamentarians, if you really want to unite Germany and create this German nation state, nice parliamentarian decisions aren't the way to do it. Talking isn't the way to do it. Blood and iron is meaning war. So the fact that he's actually doing that, you know, and then goes ahead and provokes three wars with other countries, wins all of them, and then unites Germany under that banner, that impressed a lot of people at the time. Both the liberals who actually worked with him for quite a long time in Parliament in quite a constructive fashion, not unacrimonious, but certainly in a way that actually works as well as people, you know, in the old elites, basically, who see him as the only means of preserving some of their power. So he is seen as a unifying figure. And you often find, especially later on, depictions of him as a blacksmith. So he is basically presented as a sort of blacksmith who's forging the German nations sort of in the fires of war, if you want to term it in those dramatic terms. But that's how he's seen kind of as the founding father, if you will, the person who forged that empire.
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Spencer Nissen
How was he received in Great Britain? I mean, was it fear, admiration, a mixture of both?
- [27:35]
Katja Hoyer
I would say it was a bit of both. I mean, Britain was quite impressed with Prussia's efforts in the Napoleonic wars already. So the fact that this kind of quite small, at that point, small power was managing to really make a significant contribution to Waterloo, in particular to the Battle of Waterloo. So there was already some admiration there. There were British civil servants who went to Prussia to see how the civil service was arranged there, because it was deemed to be one of the most modern, most Clean and efficient ways of kind of running a state as well, because it was done from scratch pretty much. So there was already a lot of admiration there for the things that Prussia had achieved in the 19th century. And I would say that that mixed in with a bit of fear in the sense that it had just shown how powerful it can be. But at the same time I would say the fear of the French was still bigger because of the Napoleonic War. And so the idea was from a British point of view that if some sort of power balance could be achieved on the European continent, then perhaps next time it wouldn't just be sort of Britain standing alone as it were, against an overbearing French power until the other European powers get their act together. That's, that's how the Napoleonic wars were still remembered by many people in Britain. So the idea was that this could be a good counterpart and if Germany remains a peaceful state then that's not necessarily a bad thing. And Bismarck already had good contacts to Britain already because he'd been a diplomat for a while, he'd been the Prussian ambassador in Saint Petersburg and in France and he got to know a lot of British politicians. Disraeli is a classic example. He had a sort of love hate relationship, I would say with them, but one that was based on mutual respect where both of them saw each other as sort of great statesmen. So that was already in place and there was a sort of healthy respect. But I would say mostly a sense of this could be a good thing for Britain.
- [29:23]
Spencer Nissen
Okay, so after The Franco Prussia Mori rules for I think another 19 years. What were his greatest achievements on. We've talked a lot about war on the international stage. What are his greatest achievements on a domestic level?
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah, so I think one of his greatest or maybe the greatest achievement is that he actually balanced out a lot of the competing interests that existed in those 19 years. So you had the old powers, the new, the people, if you will, and also the middle classes who all had different ideas as to what they wanted from the state. State. He was able to balance out the different regional interests as well. The southern states, Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemberg were particularly reluctant to join because they were Catholic and whilst the north was Prussian and suddenly they were basically a minority in this new state. It was about 1/3 Catholic, 2/3 Protestant. And so that was the thing that Bismarck had to be quite careful about, even though he was quite suspicious of the Catholics and did fight them in the so called Kultur camp for culture wars at the time. But he did effectively make them allies again afterwards and manage to bind them into the state as well. There was a half democracy which kept the liberals happy. So you had a parliament which was actually quite democratic in the sense that it was voted for by universal male suffrage. So all men, all adult men were able to vote without differences in their wealth or land ownership or status, which by European standards was quite modern at the time. And he did also realize that socialists was becoming a thing. So during the 1848 revolutions you have Karl Marx, also a German, writing the Communist Manifesto. And that's a big trend that Bismarck manages to integrate in that he creates a welfare state that is quite modern for the time. So with things like pensions, for example, and also things like sickness payments, invalid payments, those kinds of things, it's quite a new thing. And I would say possibly the most extensive kind of welfare system that Germany is still or basing its modern ideas on kind of what the state is and the idea that it should look after its people as well. Again, none of this is done out of a sense of altruism. It's not like Bismarck is a socialist or a social democrat. But he calls the state socialism and basically says if the state does a bit of socialism then there's no need for the socialists to do their socialism and the workers will be happy enough in our state. And that is accompanied by a lot of repression on the other, other side. But he does basically do some good things as well, which lasted as well and outlasted his legacy. Another one is secularization I should just quickly mention. So he was trying to take some of the powers away from the church and by that made things like marriages and things like that, basically state run rather than run by the church. That's still the case today. If you want to get married in Germany legally you can do that in a church, but you still have to have a civilization ceremony as well. Just the religious one isn't valid. And that goes down to Bismarck's changes. So you made quite a big impact, I would say, in lasting impact on the way that Germany still is today.
- [32:24]
Spencer Nissen
And how did his political career come to an end?
- [32:28]
Katja Hoyer
During the nearly two decades that he was in power, he'd really structured the entire system around himself. And that's arguably the biggest flaw of the whole thing is that it only worked. He wrote the constitution effectively himself or came up with the concept of it. And this meant that you had the monarch as the head of state, but the chancellor as the head of government. And both of them had extensive powers in that state. So effectively this only Works if one or the other takes a step back and lets the other one kind of determine the course. And this was fine so long as it was Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I running the show. Because Kaiser Willem I was very old, old. It wasn't expected to live long actually and then live much, much longer than he did into the 1870s and 80s. But then when he died his son took over very briefly, Frederick iii he had throat cancer though and so basically only ran the country for 100 days in 1888. And then his son Willem II came into power, young, very nationalist, very strong headed, Queen Victoria's oldest grandson. So he's got this bizarre love hate relationship with England and he wants to do his own thing and basically says to Bismarck, you've had your day, you know, let me run the show. And. And the two of them just don't see eye to eye over the next two years between 1888 and 1890. And eventually Willem basically says, you know what, I don't really need a Chancellor. I can see how I have to have one because the constitution says I do. But I really don't want the Chancellor to run the show. I just want him to administer my decisions and basically bring them to Parliament and make Parliament do what I say. And so eventually Bismarck's resignation is forced in 1890 because the two men just can't run the country together. And Wilhelm thinks it's a better way forward to rule directly and basically pick chancellors going forward who are more willing to do what the monarch does, not the other way around.
- [34:23]
Spencer Nissen
And how well did Bismarck take this turn of events? Was he quite bitter about it at.
- [34:28]
Katja Hoyer
He was indeed. I mean this is his project and he just hadn't considered the fact that one day he might not get to choose how to leave it and, and in what state to leave it in and in his mind. Because Willem as I say is quite young, still in his late 20s at the time. So he basically assumes that he's going to be the sort of mentor and father figure to Willem. And actually he had played that role as William was growing up so he assumed that it would just carry on like that for them, would basically learn how to run the country under Bismarck whilst Bismarck gets to do his own thing. He had been doing this for nearly 20 years and he's so used to bullying the King about or the Kaiser at this point that he thought he was going to do it again, especially with a younger man. So he did indeed become very bitter when he was made to resign. Spent ages writing his resignation speech several days to make sure that it would put all the blame for anything that happens next, not on him, but on the people who made him resign. And then he sat there basically on his estate for the rest of his days and decided to write very angry articles and letters and things about what was going on. As he was watching his project unravel, he really didn't want Germany to be a colonial power. He thought that this was a very dangerous, again, not for moral reasons, but because he thought this would provoke conflict. And then he was watching Wilhelm turn Germany into a colonial power very quickly with all the consequences that we now know about. And he became quite bitter about that and continued to sort of rant from his estate at this desk.
- [35:55]
Spencer Nissen
Okay, so things didn't turn out the way he imagined they would. But that notwithstanding, I mean, there's little doubt he was one of the sort of supreme figures in 19th century European history. What would you say then are his greatest legacies? To what extent did he shape German, indeed European history not only in the second half of the 19th century, but also into the early 20th century?
- [36:23]
Katja Hoyer
Yeah, I mean, that is a big question because even the question, would unification have happened without him? I think it would have done because there was, you know, a lot of clamor for that already. But certainly it wouldn't have happened when it happened because those were the three wars, effectively, that Bismarck provoked and then also managed to use politically in the way that he did. So I think the way and the timing of German unification is definitely down to Bismarck. And from that angle alone, I think he's one of the rare examples of the sort of great man theory in action where one person does have a huge impact on the way that history shapes and works out. In the end, I think on the positive side, he did create, I would say, the way that Germany still understands its own identity today. So, for example, the fact that Germany is a federal state is hugely important to the way that Germany is run. The fact that the individual states get a lot of power, even today still over things like education, for example, is entirely in state hands. There's no central curriculum for Germany. And that is down to the way that Bismarck set up the country basically as a compromise between unity and saying, you can still be Bavarian, but you can also be German. And that's basically, I would say, a legacy that's lasted. Also the way that kind of parliament works, the way that the system is set up is very much, again, not because he's a huge kind of fan of democracy, but really the fact that Germany sees itself as, as a state that has the sort of two chamber system isn't entirely down to him because there were some ideas like that before. But the way that this works together basically is also the way that he set the whole thing up. And I would say also on a more sort of national identity that Germany I think still hasn't quite worked out what role it actually wants to play in Europe and in the world. But his idea was that Germany isn't taking sides between eastern west, for example, it's not as obviously a western state as say France or Britain are. It looks east as much as west. And Bismarck famously said the secret to power politics is making a good treaty with Russia. So this kind of east and west looking thing, Bismarck envisioned Germany to be, quote, unquote, the honest broker. That was the phrase that he used using its military and its economic and its geopolitical might to sort out the conflicts between other states. That was kind of his idea. And I would say in a way, you know, as we've seen with the conflict in Ukraine and also just more generally kind of Germany still trying to come to terms with the role that it wants to play in NATO, for example. Is it a leading state there? Does it get involved in military conflict? Yes, of course, the Second World War has had a huge impact on that. But more generally speaking, the idea that Germany isn't part of, of any particular bloc quite in the same obvious way as other countries are, I think also goes down to the way that Bismarck was trying to manage this sort of east west position that Germany has and the legacy of that loss.
- [39:20]
Spencer Nissen
Sure. Finally, Katja, how is he remembered in Germany today?
- [39:24]
Katja Hoyer
He's a very, very controversial figure in Germany today. I would say that's quite a recent thing. So when I was at school in the sort of 1990s, early teenagers, 2000s in Germany, we were still looking at sort of giant maps that the teacher had rolled into the classroom about the complicated foreign policy alliances that he managed to put in place and how he kept the peace. And the story was basically, it was such a complicated, intricate, expertly crafted system that it did keep the peace in a situation where conflict was arising in the 19th century. And then it was the collapse of that Bismarckian system that led to the First World War. That was sort of the story that I was told. So we still had Bismarck as a geopolitical genius basically on our curriculum more recently because under him industrialists basically pressed ahead, German industrialists pressed ahead and acquired lands in Africa and Asia and elsewhere and basically began a German colonialism with all of its very, very ugly policies like concentration camps, genocide, and so on. None of that directly happened under Bismarck. And as I say, he was against creating an empire. But what he did do is take some of these territories that private individuals had acquired when they ran into trouble, funnily enough, with local people who didn't want to be ruled by Germans. He took those lands under a sort of German protectorate, as it was called at the time. So really the first colonies were acquired under Bismarck's regime, despite the fact that he was reluctant about. So in the context of Black Lives Matter and other sort of new cultural movements that we have today, the statue toppling and so on, Bismarck's come under a lot of fire as an early colonialist and is therefore also seen in a more controversial light. So statues of him were being vandalized and sprayed on. People had even sort of, you know, cultural figures, public figures, suggested to take the statues down or even destroy them. So that's a more recent debate in the context of the culture. But wars that we live in now, where he's kind of reinterpreted by depending on your own political views today, really where he fits in. So I wouldn't say that there is a way of remembering Bismarck, but now actually quite a varied debate and some multipolar debate about him.
- [41:39]
Advertiser
That was German British historian and journalist Katja Hoyer. She was speaking to Spencer Nissen.