Best biography of bismarck
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Bismarck: A Life
Nineteenth century europe was a game of two halves or, better, a game of two men: the Emperor Napoleon, who dominated the first, and Otto von Bismarck, who dominated the second. If anything Bismarck was the more important of the two, creating not just a new Germany but a new europe, with a legacy that extended well into the twentieth century. He was the greater because he was the more cunning; the lesser because his vision was considerably more limited. In some ways Bismarck was the best statesman Germany ever had; in other ways the worst.
The paradox of the Iron Chancellor fryst vatten superbly explored by Jonathan Steinberg in Bismarck: A Life, published earlier this year. Given his importance it’s remarkable how little attention he has achieved in the English-speaking world, obsessed, as it fryst vatten, with Hitler. The only other study that inom have read is Alan Palmer’s Bismarck, a dated and not terribly satisfactory biography. Steinberg makes up for
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Bismarck
Excerpt
Introduction
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Those who possess great political power for a long time and then suddenly lose it generally feel the urge to compose their memoirs – not only in order to transmit to posterity as favourable a view as possible of their own achievement, but also so as to settle accounts with former political opponents. It was no different in the case of Otto von Bismarck after his fall. On 16 March , one day after his definitive break with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, he confided to a visitor: ‘Now I am going to write my memoirs’. Meanwhile, the Reich Chancellery was already piled high with boxes full of secret files that Bismarck, during the next few weeks, would have taken to Friedrichsruh, his place of retirement in the Saxon Forest, outside Hamburg.
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As his assistant, Bismarck chose Lothar Bucher, a former liberal whom he had appointed a councillor in the Foreign Ministry, where he served Bismarck faithfully. Without Bucher’s in
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Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg – review
Otto von Bismarck became minister-president of Prussia in September His appointment was a desperate roll of the dice by King Wilhelm I, who faced constitutional crisis when parliament rejected a bill that increased the length of military service and reduced the role of the civilian reserve. After contemplating abdication, the king instead summoned the year-old Junker, a man reviled by liberals because of his violently reactionary statements, yet deeply distrusted by orthodox conservatives as an unprincipled political schemer. Jonathan Steinberg's readable new biography quotes a Prussian diplomat, Councillor von Zschock in Stuttgart, who wrote that Bismarck's very name caused "profound hatred in the depth of the soul of every true friend of Prussia". Few thought he would last long; some believed he had been appointed only to provoke a reaction that would open the way to military dictatorship.
Nine years and three wars later