- 15

infidelity; God and the devil then I can argue no longer and can merely say
'I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.'"

And even this bitter declaration of faith paled before the cynical
avowal whose wounding quality was only heightened by its reminder of Gerlach's
role in Bismarck's career and by being couched in the religious categories
of Gerlach's Pietism: "I did not seek the service of the King. . .and the
God Who unexpectedly placed me into it will probably rather show me the way
out of it than let me soul perish. Or at least he will listen to my daily
prayer and send me friends to help me do so. I would overestimate the
value of this life strangely. . .should I not be convinced that after 30
years it will be irrelevant to me what political successes I or my country
have achieved in Europe. I can even think out the idea that someday
'unbelieving Jesuits' will rule over the Mark Brandenburg together with a
Bonapartist absolutism. . .I am a child of different times as you, but as
honest a one of mine as you of yours."

This was the last letter ever exchanged between Bismarck and Gerlach.

With the exchange with Gerlach the main lines of Bismarck's thought
were established: One by one he had exploded the myths of the "Metternich
system"; he had declared the German Confederation as a fetter to the develop-
ment of Prussia's power and the Holy Alliance as a means to perpetuate the
disparity between Austria and Prussia; the traditional ally had been asserted
as Prussia's antagonist and France the "hereditary" enemy as a potential ally.
And the unity of conservative interests, the truism of policy for over a

10. L. G., p. 345f, 2/4 May, 1860.

- 16

generation, had been exposed as subordinate to the requirement of national
interest. The state and not its fleeting embodiments nor its various forms
of government was the basic unit with which the statesman had to deal. The
significance of Bismarck's criticism did not, of course, lie in the fact that
it was made — the tenuousness of the Metternich system was a shibboleth of
the mid-19th century — but in the manner in which it was justified. Here-
tofore the attacks on the principle of legitimacy had occurred in the name of
other principles of presumably greater validity such as nationalism, liberalism,
etc. But here was a challenge which declared the relativity of _all_ beliefs,
which translated them into forces and evaluated them only in terms of the
power they could generate. To be sure, Bismarck had a personal preference
for certain forms of government but they rarely interfered with his
exploitation of the tactical requirements of the situation. Bismarck there-
fore marked the transition from the personal to the formal principle of
political obligation. The eighteenth century had personalized its principle
of obligation in the Divine right of Kings and thereby limited it, for there
is a necessary point beyond which the exercise of personal authority is
inconceivable. To Bismarck, on the other hand, the only unvarying end was
the state; it was the sole absolute and before it the individual desire was
reduced to subjective preference.

Bismarck's thus was the ultimate application of that skeptical
philosophy which the 18th century had produced but its whose import it had
failed to grasp. If all faith was a euphemism for self-interest, it became
a datum to be manipulated. If all conviction was a means of self-assertion,
then it became the proper tool for whoever understood its true essence.
But however hard-boiled Bismarck's philosophy appeared, it in its turn was

- 19

but as a means to assure Prussia's security. It was the state as a
historical unit, not the nation as a linguistic and cultural group, which
was the basic unity of Bismarck's thought. No document expresses this
more clearly than an extensive memorandum written to the new Prince Regent
at the end of March 1858, after his mental illness forced Frederick William
IV to relinquish the reins of office. Dispassionate and incisively
written, it performs for German problems what the "master-report" does for
the field of European diplomacy: it furnishes an outline of Bismarck's
later policy.

The memorandum began with the familiar catalogue of Prussia's
grievances: the system of majority votes which gave the minor states a
disproportionate voice, the interest of Austria in perpetuating this
arrangement, the danger that the Confederation might utilize any moment of
danger for Prussia to humiliate it. Nor was it possible to improve the
constitutional arrangements of the Confederation through the cooperation of
the other states: "The secondary states. . .find in the Assembly of the
Confederation a pedestal from which they can discourse about the affairs of
Germany and Prussia, indeed even about European policy more loudly than would
be permissible were they in immediate contact with the facts of world
affairs. . .It is not surprising then that they are interested in developing
an institution in which with a minimum of effort they obtain not only security
but an accretion of influence. Thus in case of war Hessen-Darmstadt has the
right to claim the assistance of the Prussian army and in return assists
Prussia with 6200 men. . ."

14. W. II, p. 302f. (Called in German historiography the "little book")

On the other hand Prussia could not continue to accept such a relationship: "In this system there is no room for Prussia unless Prussia is prepared to relinquish its place as a European power. A great power desirous of conducting its own foreign policy on the basis of its intrinsic strength can agree to a greater centralisation of the Confederation only if it assumes its leadership and is capable of insisting on the adoption of its own program." Austria, however, would never accept this solution, not because of personal ill will but because it required the resources of the Confederation to defend its European position. In this manner, "the limits of the competency of the Confederation disappear in the fog in which the diplomats of the Confederation reinforce each other's illusion that the treaties bringing about the Confederation possess a greater degree of sanctity than international treaties in general."

But if it was Prussia's task to make explicit the tenuousness of the German Confederation, what had become of Prussia's German mission? What of the hopes of the generation of the War of Liberation that Prussia sparred the drive for German unity? The destruction of the German Confederation, Bismarck replied, was the ultimate realization of Prussia's German mission, for only the particularist self-will of the governments, not the people, stood in Prussia's way: "Prussia's interests coincide with those of most German states, except Austria, but not with their governments and there exists nothing more German than the development of rightly conceived Prussian interests. For this very reason Prussia finds itself opposed by the majority of the governments which are alone represented in the Assembly of the Confederation and which institute the main obstacle to the forceful development of Germany. Prussia will achieve freedom of action for its German mission

- 21

only if it ceases. . .to cater to the governments of the secondary German states."

Thus German unity was made necessary by the difficulty of Prussia to conduct the policy of a great power in the present framework. It was not a theoretical but a practical goal, not justified by doctrines of liberalism but of power, even if the means to achieve it were through an appeal to the people against their governments. For four decades Prussian policy had been stymied by the paradox that it would have to ally itself with its domestic opponents in order to defeat its adversaries with Germany. It remained for Bismarck to declare that the paradox was only apparent, that Prussia was strong enough to appeal to liberal elements in the rest of German without weakening its own domestic structure.¹ "The sense of security that the King remains master in his country even if the whole army should be abroad is not shared with Prussia by any other Continental state and above all by no other German power; it provides the opportunity to accept a development of public affairs much more in conformity with the requirements of the present. The degree of activity consistent with the maintenance of authority is much greater in Prussia than in the rest of Germany. . .The royal authority in Prussia is so firmly based that the government can without risk encourage a much more lively parliamentary activity and thereby exert pressure on conditions in Germany."

This then was the culmination of the hints contained in the first parliamentary speeches, developed in the early reports from Frankfurt, ripened during the Crimean war and given a theoretical justification in the exchange with Gerlach: The Archimedean point for Bismarck was Prussia, the state whose

15. See also letter to Manteuffel, W. II, p. 323, 10 April, 1858.

- 22

sense of obligation was strong enough to combine a repressive policy at home with a revolutionary policy abroad, the society capable of producing a Bismarck whose withering cynicism nevertheless always stopped short of one question: Whether any state had the right so to manipulate the beliefs of a generation; why it should have been Prussia that played the role of fate for Germany. The postulate of Prussia's uniqueness was implicit in this most inclusive statement of Bismarck's views on the German question as it had been explicit in his early speeches. That Prussia had to absorb Germany rather than the opposite was an act of faith not of knowledge, proving that the condition of cynicism is a strong belief.

The course for Prussia was thus charted as opposition to Austria throughout all the fluctuations of European politics, to wait for the inevitable embarrassments of Austria and then to use all available means to achieve Prussia's objectives. All that remained was the opportunity to put these maxims into effect.

And Austria had mortgaged its future too severely during the Crimean War to escape its dilemmas by a rigid adherence to the status quo. The complications in Italy foreseen by Bismarck in 1856 finally occurred in 1859 when Sardinia challenged Austria with French support. As in the Crimean War Austria added to its embarrassments by a policy of confused inaction while Sardinia mobilized its forces only to follow it with an ultimatum which cut the ground from under a British effort of mediation. And the isolation of Austria which Bismarck had foreseen became a reality. Napoleon had protected himself through a secret treaty with Russia which thereby gave up its rigid

- 25

took over at Berlin. Although far from liberal, the new ruler had been outraged by the arbitrariness of the Manteuffel ministry and a week after taking the oath of office, he dismissed Manteuffel. And Bismarck's position, too, had become untenable. Not only had he clashed with the then Prince of Prussia during the Crimean War but the Prince Regent's wife Augusta had not foggotten their encounter during the revolution of 1848. It did not help that Bismarck wrote his long treatise on the German question to inspire the new ruler, nor that he wrote a subtle report to the new foreign minister, Shlimitz, placing his own misgivings into the mouth of his colleagues.

In February 1859, he was transferred to St. Petersburg as Prussian ambassador.

To be sure, according to the protocol of Prussian diplomacy, St. Petersburg was a promotion. But the German question was decided at Frankfurt and it was in Germany that Bismarck saw Prussia's real opportunities. There was no occasion to write fundamental reports from Russia except during the Sardinian crisis. Bismarck did not fail to state Russia's reservations in the most abrupt terms and he even hinted that Russia would make war with Prussia rather than permit an Austrian victory, a peport to which the Prince Regent added a plea for peace in a marginalia. After the Sardinian crisis, however, Bismarck's stay in St. Petersburg played the role of the retreat into the wilderness in the lives of so many great men. It was there while waiting for fate to return him to the center of events that he prepared himself to acquire the quality which supplies the balance to genius: the virtue of patience.

If Bismarck left Frankfurt with a feeling of bitterness about the futility of his effort, he was mistaken, however. For we owe to his stay

20. W. II, p. 39.

21. W. III, p. 47.

- 26

in Frankfurt the reports analyzed in the previous chapters where now with impetuosity, now in the pedantic jargon of official Prussian, but always with rare dialectical skill and great cloverness, Bismarck charted the course of his later policy. Seldom has a statesman prepared so imposing a blueprint, never has he followed it more consistently. It was not, to be sure, a comprehension of the content of Bismarck's thought which led to Bismarck's accession to power. For Bismarck was too out of scale to be understandable to so limited, if honorable, a personality. AS THE NEW RULER OF RUSSIA, Great men can achieve recognition only through posterity when their vision has become commonplace or through a period of crisis which obliterates all inhibitions.

It was not then because Bismarck had succeeded in persuading that he came into office; rather it was as a measure of despair, a last resort when no one else was willing to DEAL WITH an impasse which the new King had reached with his Parliament.

material as by a direct attack. Here was a man of powerful convictions and
an elemental will to make them effective; a sceptic in the profoundest sense,
who did not challenge truths originated outside himself but could not even
conceive them; a cynic to whom individuals were natural phenomena to be
utilized according to their characteristics — all this buttressed by a
religiosity which enabled Bismarck to project himself on a superhuman scale:
"The God who moves worlds can protect me too with his wings." But even the
most sovereign personality requires a measure of certainty as a condition for
his conduct. The world may be moved by levers and it may seem easy if the
lever is sufficiently long. But no lever can be effective without a firm
fulcrum. What then was the fulcrum from which Bismarck moved the world?

lying, calumniating dishonesty of the opposition and the malevolent intent with
which it shuts itself against all reasoning and about the thoughtless super-
ficiality of the mass with which the mightiest arguments do not count against
the banal phraseology of the Rhenish wine-marchants' policy."

Well might the stodgy land-owners who represented Prussian conservatism con-
gratulate themselves on the acquisition of this fighter. And as he made speech
after speech against the laws to eliminate the vestiges of feudal rule, such
as the power of the landed nobility to appoint the judges, against the granting
legal equality of the Jews (for the characteristic reason that he could not
imagine a Jew as a representative of a King by the grace of God), against an
attempt to tax the agricultural districts more heavily — all delivered with a
wit and sarcasm heretofore foreign to the conservative cause, Bismarck soon
achieved prominence as one of the ablest advocates of the legitimist side. He
was received at court "by our friend the King and the High Personages spoiled me
very much."

But had his colleagues listened more closely they would have realized that
they had acquired an ally who might ultimately prove more dangerous to them than
their antagonists whose pedantry prevented them from drawing ultimate conclusions.
For what Bismarck was defending in the *Vereinigte Landtag* was not a principle but
a fact, not a doctrine but a preference. He attacked liberalism not because of
its violation of the lessons of *universal history* but because of its violation of
the laws of *Prussian history*; and he defended the monarchy not because legitimate
rule was sacrosanct but because of the historical accident that Prussia had never
undergone a revolution. "In 1688 the British people found themselves in a different
position from that of Prussia to-day; a century of revolution and civil war had
placed it in the position of being able to bestow a crown and to attach conditions
to it ... While the Prussian kings are in possession of a crown not by the grace
of the people but by that of God." And even the defense of the privileges of the *Nabob*

1. W. 14/I, p. 91.

2. W. 14/I, p. 97

3. Kahl I, p. 13

-14-

sovereign governments still remained and no less jealous of their prerogatives.

To be sure, by the end of March there met in Frankfurt a Vorparlement, a preliminary parliament to prepare the way for a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage which was to draft a German constitution. But Frankfurt was not Paris. It was not the center of administration of Germany, but simply the former meeting place of a diplomatic assembly which had been designed to remain ineffective. The German Parliament had therefore to operate side by side with thirty-three sovereign governments and its power was no greater than their willingness to obey or to surrender voluntarily their prerogatives.

And there always remained Austria, a member of the German Confederation with
For Austria was not only a German state but a polyglot Empire based
on a set of feudal relationships. Its German provinces performed a dual
function: they belonged to the German Confederation but they also were
the nucleus for controlling millions of Magyar, Slav and Poles. Thus, the
role of Austria in a unified Germany presented almost insurmountable
difficulties: If Austria joined the new state with its German provinces only,
its Empire would perforce disintegrate. But if it joined its entirety, the
German Empire would mortgage its future by absorbing some 25 million foreigners.

ON THE OTHER HAND, Germany without Austria was harder still to conceive. The memory of 100 years of Holy Roman Emperors from the Hapsburg dynasty could not be erased nor the historical achievement of what had been Germany's bulwark towards the East. From its beginning therefore the Preliminary Anны and later the National Assembly was torn by schisms of structure, of history, and of aspirations. And wherever it turned, it came up against the stark reality that the Gordian knot could not be cut by constitutional theories, only by leadership and that only Prussia was capable of supplying it.

But Prussia was far from ready to serve as the spearhead for a liberal, unified Germany. Its revolution had been only skin-deep and successful more

-15-

because of the indecisiveness of the King than through widespread popular exertion. Neither of the pillars of the Prussian state, the army and the bureaucracy, had been fundamentally shaken. And the King with his romantic notions of feudal fealty proved a weak reed for the nationalists. Already the first delegation of the Frankfurt Parliament was to learn that here was a man for the magnificent pose but not for the decisive action: "Should a crown come about for Germany," announced Frederick William then, "it should adorn the Austrian ruler and with pleasure would I hold the silver chalice for him at the coronation." In this manner time was lost and while constitutional fine points were being discussed in Frankfurt, the traditional Prussia collected its composure and its strength for the moment when it could impatiently sweep away the idealistic debates of the reformers.

No segment of the society had been more painfully aware of the transformation than the Junkers. It was their army which had been ordered to retreat before what they considered rabble; it was their notion of hierarchy and order which seemed under most violent attack. What did it matter that their King might now become Emperor of Germany? The crown of Prussia had ever possessed a lustre for this group that needed no enhancing — this indeed had been the condition of their loyalty. And for Bismarck there was an additional reason for bitterness. His whole conception of patriotism was based on a notion of Prussia's peculiarity, its specific sense of duty, its special embodiment of authority. To be sure he wanted to see Prussia great, but not at the cost of its dissolution in another entity however existed. A liberal Prussia, with the King deprived of authority, a Prussia which might become a province of a united Germany, this to Bismarck was no longer Prussia. It was almost as if the Seven Years' War had been lost

12. Stern, VII, p. 94.

-18-

inquired about the state of public opinion in the provinces Bismarck replied sharply: "It was good, but since we have been innoculated with the revolutionary virus by the royal authorities with royal blessing, it has deteriorated. What is lacking is confidence in the assistance of the King." Every word was chosen for maximum effect in this ambiguous defiance, whose show of daring was ameliorated by the fact that Bismarck was accusing the King of not being sufficiently royalist. That Bismarck had conquered the moral terrain became immediately apparent in Frederick William's plaintive query what precisely Bismarck was accusing him of. When Bismarck replied "the evacuation of the troops from Berlin," the Queen interrupted with the statement that the King was "innocent" for he had not slept for three days before giving his orders. The Queen was no match for Bismarck who replied with a sentence which summed up both his conception of authority and his diplomatic skill: "A king must be able to sleep." Here was nothing of the deferential sense of hierarchy of the conservative nor of the awe before the ruler by the grace of god of the legitimist. What was at stake was the basic unit of Bismarck's thinking, the nature of the Prussian state and the King was valuable only as long as he lived up to Bismarck's notion of its specific essence. And when the King attempted to evade his responsibility by pleading human frailty, Bismarck silenced him with an unanswerable argument which at the same time defined his attributes. The King was left with the choice of either accepting Bismarck's definition of the nature of the Prussian state or denying that he was a King. Not for the last time was Bismarck to deal with his King by confronting him with impossible alternatives.

15. G. E. I, p.

for I have not changed my opinion in the last six months... The past is buried and I regret it more deeply than many of you that no human power can reawaken it now that the crown has itself thrown the earth on its coffin. But if I accept what has been imposed I can nevertheless not quit the Vereinigte Landtag with the lie that I am grateful or happy about what I must consider at best an erroneous direction. Should it really prove possible to achieve a unified German fatherland by means of the new road we have taken or even a legal order then the moment will have come to thank the originators of the new system; but now I find it impossible."

All of the strains of Bismarck's thought are concentrated in this brief passage: The empirical view of policy ever ready to accept unalterable facts; the implicit rejection of dogmatism; the barely suppressed defiance towards royal authority which was bound by the terms of the act of submission; the willingness to use any material available in the construction of a political order. And finally the tremendous passion which reduced all of politics to personal terms, so strong that at the end of the first paragraph of his speech, Bismarck suffered a fit of weeping and had to leave the rostrum.

But Bismarck's outburst was premature for it proved more difficult to subdue the traditional Prussia than it had seemed in the first flush of revolutionary success. By the middle of April the King was permitted to leave Berlin for Potsdam where surrounded by his officers he soon came to regret his impetuous gestures of a few weeks previous. Particularly active in strengthening Frederick William's backbone was his immediate environment, especially his military adjutant,

17. Kohl I, p. 46.

-26-

E/P

legitimating principle had fallen away and the power has become the final arbiter. In such situations the victory is all too likely to go to the most ruthless, the one in short not inhibited by the memory of the maxims of the disintegrated legitimacy. And for this reason Bismarck's reaction to the question of German unity was extremely ambivalent. He had opposed the revolution in Prussia partly because it seemed to challenge the prerogatives of the Junkers but above all because by transforming Prussia's historic essence it would restrict its power at a moment of unexcellied opportunity. For Bismarck was too much the naturalist not to see that with the disintegration of the "Metternich system" Prussia was once more the largest purely German state, strong enough to dictate its will to the remainder. He therefore opposed the labors of the Frankfort Nationalversammlung which he called the "German fraud," because it attempted to dissolve Prussia in the larger whole and on the basis of constitutional principles foreign to its nature. But the violence of his opposition was merely the reverse side of his conviction that if Germany must not dissolve Prussia, Prussia might absorb Germany. When Bismarck derided the work of the Frankfort liberals, he was not, as his conservative friends imagined, defending the unity of conservative interests but the pre-eminence of Prussia. And when he opposed the revolution within Prussia, he did so in a sense, to free Prussia to pursue a more active revolution abroad, albeit not a liberal one. "What matter the little states," Bismarck wrote a friend, "all that concerns me is to secure and to expand Prussia's power."

24

But so strong were the prevailing categories of thought, that no one in the Prussian parliament saw in Bismarck anything but an arch-conservative defending the cause of legitimacy as he mounted the rostrum on April 21, 1849 for his speech on

24. Ludwig, p. 108.