life. It was she who had him educated at the great Berlin school the Graue Kloster, and who taught him that there was more to life than tending his father’s run-down estates and drinking at the officers’ club. Although Bismarck would later deny his middle-class roots it was his mother who first opened his eyes to the fascinating world of politics.6
Bismarck’s early career contained few clues to his future success. His first port of call was Göttingen University, where he was stirred not by the words of his liberal colleagues, but by literature, particularly the fiery work of Sir Walter Scott. After Göttingen he studied in Berlin, sat the rigorous Prussian civil service exams, spent a year in the military and then suddenly took eight years off to help manage his father’s crumbling estate. Despite the much professed love of his Junker heritage the years at Schönhausen dragged slowly by and according to his brother he spent hours dreaming of great battles and future glory to come. When the 1848 revolution broke out he decided that it was time to act. He rounded up the peasants on his estate and prepared to march them to Berlin to save his beleaguered king. Although his mission ended in failure he decided from that moment on to become actively involved in affairs of state. He rejoined the civil service and managed to get himself appointed as ambassador to the Frankfurt Diet, where he nurtured a budding contempt for parliamentarians. His next posting in St Petersburg taught him the advantages of the tsar’s autocratic regime, which he admired, while his stint in Paris made him despise the effete French. But wherever he went his love for all things Prussian continued to shine through; he wrote to a friend in Berlin that ‘as soon as it was proved to me that something was in the interest of a healthy and well-considered Prussian policy, I would see our troops fire on French, Russians, English or Austrians with equal satisfaction’. His tough patriotism endeared him to his fellow Junkers – already threatened by the rise of the industrialists and the urban working class – and when a fight began to brew between the liberal parliamentarians and the king Bismarck was eager and ready to act on their behalf.7
The conflict which propelled Bismarck to power, and which ultimately crippled the might of the Prussian bourgeoisie, centred around the question of army reform. This confrontation emerged in 1860 when a new law was put before the Diet to implement reforms introduced by von Roon which included the provision for a three-year term of compulsory military service, for an annual intake of 63,000 recruits, and the weakening of the popular Landwehr, which had been created by the Scharnhorst-Boysen reforms during the Napoleonic Wars. The old liberal parliamentarians were against the reforms but both sides held firm until the king tried to break the deadlock by dissolving the Assembly and holding new elections. He actually did this twice, but to his chagrin the new Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, which included a number of liberal civil servants, became the largest political grouping.8 William was deeply troubled – what was the point of being king if he could not determine basic military policy? Finally he could stand it no longer, and when the second election result was announced he stormed to the palace and drafted a letter of abdication. The struggle between the Berliners and the Hohenzollerns appeared to be turning in the civilians’ favour when a conservative ultraroyalist candidate was proposed for the office of Prussian Prime Minister. His name was Otto von Bismarck, and this time the parliament had met its match.
The news of the possible abdication had terrified the Junkers, who knew that if William left he would be succeeded by his liberal-minded son Frederick William, who could not be relied upon to protect their feudal privileges. In a last-ditch effort to save William, the Minister of War, Albrecht von Roon, sent an urgent message to Bismarck. He was to return from Paris at once; ‘Delay is dangerous,’ he wrote. ‘Hurry!’ Bismarck arrived in the city on 20 September, and two days later, during a walk in the gardens at Babelsberg, persuaded the king to rip up his letter of abdication and promised to govern as Prime Minister without a majority and without parliamentary approval of the budget – in other words, illegally. The king grumbled that the Berliners would ‘cut off your head and later on mine on the Opernplatz beneath my windows. You’ll end up like Strafford and I like Charles I.’ But Bismarck knew Berliners better than that. He remembered the failed revolution of 1848, the lack of action, the fear of real revolution. Berliners were ‘all talk and no action’, and the parliamentarians were worst of all. They were mere ‘chatter-boxes who cannot really rule Prussia … they know as little about politics as we knew in our student days’. The conservative Kreuzzeitung newspaper predicted that he would ‘overcome domestic difficulties by a bold foreign policy’. They were right. When Bismarck stood before the budget committee a short time later he rammed home his triumphant message in his high-pitched voice: ‘Germany does not look to Prussia’s liberalism but to her strength … The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities – that was the mistake of 1848 – but by blood and iron!’9 The fateful pact at Babelsberg between Bismarck and the king marked the beginning of twenty-eight years of the Iron Chancellor’s rule, and true to his word he set about unifying Germany by force.10
Bismarck’s genius shone through in his ability to transform liberal nationalism from an oppositional ideology into an integral one and to make the principle of nationhood the unifying factor for Berlin and for Germany. Before Bismarck the Junkers and conservatives had been overwhelmingly opposed to German unification as they feared it would inevitably diminish their power. It had been left to the liberals, radicals and progressives to try to unify Germany. They had hoped to bring this about under a democratic Prussia, which they assumed would ensure parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and a host of other rights and privileges – as Arnold Ruge put it, ‘Prussia, with all its repugnant police barbarism, is the only salvation for Germany.’11 Bismarck essentially gave both groups what they wanted: he preserved the traditional power of the Junkers, but he gave the liberals their united Germany, achieving in five months what the people had failed to do in five decades. The fact that he succeeded not by the workings of liberal democracy but through ‘blood and iron’ distressed many, but his success was enough to drown most dissenting voices and turn erstwhile liberals into ardent supporters of the new Reich. He, von Moltke and the Prussian Junkers were destined to become the heroes of the new Germany.
The first of Bismarck’s three strategic wars was waged against Denmark in 1864. A speedy victory resulted in his ally, Austria, being given the territory of Holstein while he took Schleswig as his own, quickly establishing a German naval presence at the port of Kiel. This war created new enemies and a new fear of Prussia; the Frenchman Émile Ollivier said bitterly that ‘England failed France and France failed England and both failed Europe’.12 Bernhard von Bülow once commented that for Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the word German became synonymous with ‘the narrow-minded moral preaching, drilling and brute force’, and when his Danish wife Alexandra found out that her second son had been made an honorary colonel in a Prussian regiment she snapped, ‘So, my Georgie boy has become a real life, filthy, blue-coated, Picklehaube German soldier! Well, I never thought to have lived to see that!’
Denmark had been easily beaten and Bismarck turned his sights on Austria. Many in Berlin were against war with Austria, seeing it akin to Brüderkrieg – a civil war. Bismarck managed to provoke the conflict by denying the Austro-Prussian agreement and claiming that Prussia had as much right to Schleswig as to Holstein. Austria felt it necessary to defend her new territory, and the two states were soon at loggerheads. The historian Wilhelm Oncken was in no doubt that Bismarck had both wanted and provoked war with Austria, calling the disagreement over Schleswig-Holstein tantamount to ‘a declaration of war against Austria and its allies’.13
When the Seven Week War started Prussia was by far the smaller of the two combatants. The Habsburg empire had a population of 35 million subjects, bolstered by a further 14 million from some of the smaller German states. Prussia had a mere 19 million. But papers in Berlin were confident. For them Prussia had ‘the most modern army’ headed by the ‘brilliant strategist’ Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, and their technology, transportation networks, troops and armaments were ‘second to none’. The decisive battle took place at Königgrätz (Sadowa), where 500,000 men and 3,000 guns faced one another in the first modern battle in history. Within a few hours the Austrian side had collapsed. In a single battle Prussia had destroyed Austria’s bid to lead Germany to unification and the Grossdeutch solution was forgotten.14 Berlin’s