EDITORIAL NOTES

Dr. Henry Kissinger, professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Harvard University, is one of the most prominent figures in that great seat of learning. Besides contemporary history his special field of study is the development of European political thought during the nineteenth century. He has already published a number of articles on different aspects of this problem and is at present engaged in writing a comprehensive book dealing with this important subject.

Prof. Kissinger's survey of the development of Bismarck's political thought is based on a critical study of original authorities, and the conclusions at which he has arrived are the result of a patient and careful examination of relevant facts and documents. Of the supreme importance of Bismarck's role in the evolution of German unity nothing need be said here. We have to admit however that in the sub-continent we have but limited opportunities for advanced research as far as European or American history is concerned. There is no doubt that almost all our universities teach western history but even at the highest stage we depend on modern works only. The path of advanced studies is beset with obstacles such as the difficulty of studying documents in foreign languages and the non-availability of original material pertaining to the history of the west but it would be worthwhile to take necessary steps to over-come these difficulties. The study of the history of Islam and of the sub-continent is undoubtedly of primary interest for our students and any amount of time and labour spent on it would be more than justified but we cannot at the same time ignore or minimize the history and culture of other countries, particularly those which have played a vital role in the growth and development of human civilization.

Prof. Kissinger's article, it is hoped, will go a long way to stimulate interest in the study of modern European history.

THE FORMATION OF BISMARCK'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

by

PROF. HENRY KISSINGER, PH.D.

Harvard University, Cambridge, U.S.A.

Few persons have more profoundly intervened in the history of their people than Otto von Bismarck. Before he appeared on the scene, Germany and Prussia seemed to be undergoing the "normal" development towards a constitutional, liberal state. Even the opponents of this trend were conscious that they were fighting rear-guard action and that they did not possess a meaningful alternative. But five years after Bismarck came to power the problem of German unity was solved and its institution charted in a manner which reflected the aspirations of not'a single significant group, only the personal predilections of one man. Too democratic for its conservatives, too illiberal for its democrats the new settlement was designed for a solitary personality who proposed to control the contending forces, both domestic and international, by manipulating their antagonisms. Any account of the events of this period must therefore begin with the development of Otto von Bismarck.

"People are born as revolutionaries," wrote the German liberal Bamberger from his Parisian exile in 1862 in an article which attempted to explain the enigma of Bismarck's personality to the French. "Only the accident of life decides whether one becomes a Red or a White revolutionary."¹ Many years later Bismarck was to say that this was one of the few articles on himself of which he was proud. People are born as revolutionaries when the scope of their conceptions and the scale of their powers dissolve all institutions with which they deal. For institutions are designed to assimilate mediocrity, not for genius or demoniac powers.

Otto von Bismarck was born on April 2, 1815, as the son of a couple which symbolized the two pillars of Prussia's greatness, the aristocracy and the bureaucracy, the tenacity of ownership and

¹ Eyck, Erich: Bismarck (Erlenbach-Zurich, E. Rentsch, 1944) vol. II, p. 316

THE FORMATION OF BISMARCK'S POLITICAL THOUGHT 2

the period of achievement. The Bismarcks had belonged since times immemorial to that dour group of Junkers which had wrested Eastern Germany from the Slaves. They were already Junkers, Bismarck once said, when the Prussian kings were still an insignificant South German family, a sentence which expressed the self-assurance of a class to which the recognition of a superior always came hard. "All my life," Bismarck said later, "I was less concerned with commanding than with not having to obey." The supremacy of the king had been wrested but with difficulty from these independent land-owners and then only by the creation of a myth which so exalted the state that service to it came to justify the loss of independence—a myth according to which the king symbolized the unity of the state and the Junkers held its chief positions, staffing the officer corps and the top levels of the bureaucracy. And even then the king could count on the support of the Junkers only if he lived up to their conception of kingship and only so long as he did not seriously threaten their prerogatives.

There was always a potential Fronde among the Junkers, which made of obedience a claim and defended the monarchy more as a personal preference than as a principle. Nowhere was this more pronounced than among the Bismarcks whom an early ruler of Prussia listed among "the noblest and most difficult families." Nor was this tradition lost in Otto von Bismarck. When the Crown-Princess once playfully accused him of wishing to become President of a republic, he replied: "I am personally spoiled for republicanism.... According to the traditions of my family I require a monarch... However, this conviction is not hereditary, not because royalists will die out, but perhaps the kings."² So difficult was submission, that the very willingness to do so, however formal, created a claim on royalty. The king had to prove his worthiness for the fact of obedience of the servant. And behind the mask of exaggerated servility there always lurked a slightly concealed defiance, for despite all traditions, the existence of a sovereign will was hard to bear: "I will never be able to tolerate superiors,"³ wrote the young Bismarck.

² Bismarck, Otto von: *Gedanken und Erinnerungen*, (Stuttgart, Cotta, 1898), vol. I

³ Bismarck, Otto von, *Werke*, 14/1, p. 30, 9 January, 1845.

3 THE FORMATION OF BISMARCK'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Bismarck's father was a good-natured, mediocre member of his class. He had served briefly in the army but neither the disaster of Jena nor the War of Liberation could lure him away again from his ancestral estate. He had preferred independence to service even when the king took away his commission and he lost favor at the court. But independence had not proved sufficient for his bride. She had grown in an environment where status depended not on birth but on talent. The daughter of the Privy Councillor Mencken, risen from the bourgeoisie, she had been brought up according to the maxim of the Enlightenment and she insisted that her sons justify themselves by intellectual attainment and professional advancement. "I had always thought," she wrote, "that my greatest happiness would be to have a grown-up son...whose calling would permit him to penetrate much deeper into the realm of the spirit than I as a woman ever could."⁴

But to penetrate into the realm of the spirit meant to leave the Kniephof, the ancestral estate in Pomerania. It meant the discipline of a Gymnasium in Berlin far from the soil and its freedom. Never was Bismarck to lose his nostalgia for nature or the illusion that his real happiness lay in a bucolic existence. Never would he speak of his days at the Plaman Institute except with distaste nor of his relations with his mother without bitterness: "My mother," he wrote to his bride, "was a beautiful woman who loved luxury; with a bright intelligence but with little of what is called soul ... She wanted me to learn much and to achieve a great deal and it often seemed to me that she treated me harshly and coldly."⁵ "Two generations tend to alternate," he wrote another time, "A thrashed with an unthrashed one. I belong to the thrashed generation."⁶

It was no accident therefore that Bismarck always identified himself with the traditions of his father, that he considered himself the descendent of an aristocrat and not of a Privy Councillor. It was from the land that he drew the magnificent imagery of his writings and for which he reserved his tenderest feelings. Twenty years later he was to lease the Kniephof to a tenant farmer but he would

⁴ *E. I.*, 14.

⁵ *Werke*, 14/1, p. 67. 23 February, 1847.

⁶ Quoted in Ludwig.

4

never cease considering it his home: "Over the whole region of
green meadows, water and leafless oaks," he wrote on the occasion
of his last visit, "lay a soft sad atmosphere while I made my fare-
well visit to the places which were dear to me... There where
I had planned to build a new house lay the skeleton of a horse; It
was my loyal Caleb which had carried me for seven years in happi-
ness and in sadness, wildly and lazily across many a mile of road.
I thought of the heaths and the fields, the lakes and the houses with
their inhabitants whom we used to fly past; my life unfolded itself
backward until the moment when I had played at this point; the
rain was falling gently on the bushes and I gazed for a long time
into the dim sunset. Every tree I had planted, every oak under
whose rustling crown I had lain seemed to accuse me of giving them
into strange hands..."⁷

It was this immediate relationship to nature which fashioned
Bismarck's conception of the purpose of existence and his view of
man. Life was struggle and man an insignificant petty incident in
the stream of occurrences: "...It is a struggle which characterizes
life in all of nature, in all creation, beginning with the plants ...
from the insects to the birds, from the birds of prey upward to man:
there is struggle everywhere, without struggle no life and if we wish
to continue to live we must always be prepared for struggle."⁸ And
in 1856 he wrote with reference to an attack by a royal prince on
the Barbary pirates: "I can not agree with the humanitarian condem-
nation of the admiral .. The men which it cost would have died in
any case in 40 years and the money can hardly be invested better
than in the honor of the flag."⁹ It was not for nothing that the
only philosopher who interested Bismarck was Spinoza, the advocate
of a naturalistic ethic, although his deepest, insight escaped Bis-
marck, that peace could be found in resignation and that total
knowledge was an attribute only of God.

For what distinguished Bismarck from his contemporaries was
a demoniac quality which refused to be satisfied with partial know-
ledge and limited achievement. Like Prometheus of the myth he

⁷ *Werke*, 14/1, p. 84. 28 April, 1847.

⁸ Quoted in Zechlin, p. 91.

⁹ L. G., p. 301. 25 August, 1856.