Jonathan Steinberg - Bismarck: A Life - November 29, 2012

good evening ladies and gentlemen thank you all for being here tonight and I want to thank you all this I think this is the most on time audience we have ever had and I want to say this mark would be proud of you thank you sorry I've wanted to use my German accent for some time and I'm the only one who's wanted me to use the German accent for some time so tonight we have a great biographer and Jonathan Steinberg's biography of Bismarck is a wonderful book we are very grateful to our patron of this event tonight Adam star and Adam is right here in the front row Adam wave it is a unique circumstance that we have Adam here with grandmother who is also a great patron of the library who has done a wonderful plate commemorating the Central Library that we just celebrated up sorry downstairs on the third floor and the grand reading room and I would urge you on your way out tonight or any time you're visiting the library to go at the south end of the library you can see Ormus stars plate for those of you don't know Irma Starr she is one of our she's one of the great ceramic artists in the United States today doing slipware a very old and in her hands very new and very beautiful enterprise in ceramics and you'll see this plate commemorating the Central Library at the south end of the Grand Reading Room and and so it was a wonderful thing to be able to combine that tonight with Adam star who with the patronage of his parents has been but has become a patron of the library in sponsoring lecture series and we've done a lecture series with one of the directors of the Smithsonian before Adam Adam finds these topics that he's interested and he's a student today at Pembroke Hill and but he's become a very very interested particularly lately in foreign affairs so he read this review and foreign affairs am I right Adam of the Bismark biography this is before the Henry Kissinger review by the way everything I say Henry Kissinger tonight Henry Kissinger agrees with I just want you to know but Adam is a very thoughtful young man and so he's created this series for us and I'd like you to thank Adam Star for his very intelligent patronage revival now and in introducing Jonathan Steinberg who's had a great career as a fellow of Trinity Hall at Cambridge in England historian Holocaust a hystory historian of Switzerland historian of things economic and banking find that very interesting myself and and and and now with this biography which is a kind of capstone of an academic career because it is as Henry Kissinger said and as Adam star has said and I take I think you know that's there's an ascent there by the way mabye ography of Bismarck who is of course one of the most remarkable figures in in modern history you know it's an extraordinary career that Jonathan Steinberg has had coming up to this biography and I I've read this biography with with amazement the Bismarck is is an incredible character and has been a very controversial character historically I remember as an undergraduate reading a JP Taylor's biography of Bismarck which basically makes Bismarck kind of a cartoon character and and and being kind of bowled over by that and then reading subsequent biographies all of which have a very different take on Bismarck this is the first biography in which Bismarck to me leaps off the page you feel it's very psychologically acute biography it is a biography that that deals with the complexity in a very complex way of this of this man was he the precursor of Hitler is he a great romantic was he what was he invested in real politic what is the definition of real politic it's an extraordinary biography I it is the only biography I think that has a entry in the index under under Bismarck's name like this demonic the power of and and the demonic power of Bismarck and then at the same time as John this time we were saying he was - he was talking to someone who's written something very critical of Bismarck recently and he and he felt like defending Bismarck you know having having already wrote a book in which he defines him as demonic and that is the power of this book the power of empathy for the man and yet the description of the incredible demonic charisma and so I have to say it's one of the best biographies I've read in in recent years and and one of the few I think that leaves you asking as many questions as as the author clearly has has asked feeling that they've been answered somehow somewhere in the book and you have to go back to the book again and again to figure it out so it is a it's a great pleasure to me to introduce to you the author of this stunning biography Jonathan Steinberg yeah unless I've never done received or introduced with such warmth and information as crosby kemper has just done and I have to say the Henry Kissinger review which came out in April of 2011 had an electric effect on my editor who took him a month to get over it within a couple of days this fat book full of footnotes was number 22 on Amazon's book list above Tina Fey temporarily above the two gloomy Swedes and their crime things and above most of the diet books I can raise the mic that I thought it was too loud but I raised it even more okay so that that turned me from a perfectly ordinary academic into what's called an ulcer and I never done these things before and authors apparently do book events you go places book shops and you sign books and you talk to people and you're very nice to them and I've been doing this now for a year and a half I've been to various places in England and Scotland I came back from the launch of the German book I've been to lots of places in the United States but I have to say that I've never been so cordially received I've never come anywhere where the reception was so remarkable where the people had already read this stuff and in addition to everything else where the arrangements are so perfect you can be very proud of your library and its staff and Henry Fortunato and talk I also have to say that it is I think physically one of the most stupendous libraries I've ever been in you could be proud of that too it's it's a work of genius now because everybody seems to have read the book a lot of what I had intended to say I'm going to cut but I do want to say that it gives me particular pleasure to see the star family sitting in the front row here because until 15 minutes ago I didn't know the real origin of this lecture the real origin of this lecture was homework from Pembroke Hill correct and a critical mother reading the homework and saying this doesn't sound right to me where'd you get that from the critical mother then picks up the book and they have a discussion about whether he adamantly and I was assaulted by a question which I can't answer what do I really feel about Bismarck in the end and I don't know when you'll see why in a few minutes what I want to talk to you about and illustrate is how complicated Bismarck was and complicated in a way which I suppose when I wrote the book I didn't entirely realize this book was like nothing else I've ever done I've been thinking about Bismarck and lecturing on Bismarck more or less all my life and when a former student of mine invited me to put it in a prospectus for writing such a book I did it I sat down roughly speaking on the first November 2008 and I got up on the 1st of March 2009 having worked seven days a week 1012 hours a day in a kind of euphoria I don't know when I've had such a good time and when he was over I was sorry because one of the things I tried to do in the book was to explain not just what Bismarck did that's what other great biographies have done but who he was and how he did it and that's the object and to do that I went and read a whole lot of people with whom I became very friendly and I'd like treating their Diaries you don't often get a chance to read people's Diaries like that and they were really interesting and the longer I lived with them I enjoyed it so that's the the preface to what I have to say and I want to thank all of you for coming I gather this is a very large crowd by the standards of the Kansas City Public Library and I'm delighted to see you here and I hope you'll be delighted when I finish now just some facts about Bismarck because perhaps not all of you have been reading the book he was born on the 1st of April 1815 April Fool's Day and he died on July 30th 1898 he was physically very large we haven't got I haven't got absolutely reliable figures but he was promptly over six foot four and I do know that at one stage he weighed 260 pounds there's a wonderful story of his doctor which I'm not going to go into tonight that's that's something I hope you'll read yourself contemporaries were very impressed with the way he spoke his voice was extremely soft and mellow and his pronunciation was particularly beautiful and they were all without exception knocked over by the extraordinary power of his personality from 1862 to 1890 for 28 years he served as chief minister to the King of Prussia and after 1870 as Chancellor of the German Reich he was responsible for the unification of Germany through the three wars that he literally provoked in 1864 against Denmark in 1866 against Austria in 1870 against France when the victory parade in 1871 took place in Berlin after the franco-prussian War which had been a sensational victory of German arms and the genius of the general help Helmut Rahn Malka Bismarck had accomplished something which i think is probably the greatest political achievement of modern times and it was the work of a political genius of a very unusual kind and it rested on several sets of very conflicting characteristics among which were brutal disarming honesty he went for example in the summer of 1862 before he was Minister president with no certainty that he ever would be and at a party at the Austrian ambassadors house he told Israeli the Russian ambassador and the Austrian ambassador what he intended to do which was to provoke Wars in Germany and unified Germany by defeating the Austrians on the way home Disraeli walked home with the note every ride was the Russian ambassador's house he walked home with the Austrian ambassador and said pay attention to that man he means what he says now for the last four decades I've been lecturing on Bismarck and thinking about Bismarck but what I want to look at tonight is something I think I wouldn't have been able to think about before and that's the myth of Bismarck and let me start with a picture that's that's the image that is I think probably the single most photograph of Bismarck ever taken there is in a generals uniform wearing a helmet that's the picture of the iron Chancellor and that is what I want to examine and I want to suggest to you that there is here the construction of an image which was absolutely unlike what the real Bismarck was and I can't myself now having discovered this so to speak after the book was finished I can't entirely identify when and how this image grew up but I can tell you some of the stages he's known as the iron Chancellor and let's start with his most famous phrase blood and iron he said it to the Finance Committee of the Prussian lower house the lon talk on the 30th of September 1862 he had been in office for precisely eight days okay he had a terrible reputation he was thought to be the most black reactionary the most irresponsible person he goes to the committee and he had only been in office eight days and he was only in office because the King had reached a point of such despair that he was intending to abdicate the despair was caused by a crisis in the Constitution I suppose we would now call it gridlock it was a case of nineteenth-century grid lock the lower house of parliament absolutely refused to vote money for the reform of the army which had proved necessary during the Italian French war when they mobilized it was a mess multi wanted that cleaned up and general al brushed on Rowan huis Bismarck's great patron a young general then was invited by the King to draw up plans and he drew up splendid plans to make the army much more efficient and larger to extend the draft etc etc all that cost money and the Parliament would not pay fiscal cliff I think it was and I went against a frivolous comparison because they really would not pay the result was that the king kept calling elections in each election the liberal majority got bigger at which point the Kings that I've had enough I'm 65 years old clearly I can't go through with this I will not give up the control of my army I will resign and let my more liberal son run the country at which point Rowan said Your Majesty I we I don't know what exactly said but must have been something this I've been asking you for four years to see Bismarck he's the only one who can save us Bismarck came the King saw him and as I won't say the rest is history but it is in a sense the rest is history so we're in office eight days it's a very controversial appointment most people think he's appointed this raving lunatic reactionary only as pretext to replace the parliamentary system with a military dictatorship a royal military dictatorship Bismarck goes to the to the committee and he finishes his speech with the following famous phrases I quote Prussia must build up and preserve her strength for the advantageous moment which has already come and gone many times her borders under the trees of Vienna are not favourable for the healthy existence of the state the great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions that was the great mistake of 1848 and 49 but by blood and iron Bismarck made a rare slip on the way back from the talk Ron said to him I don't think that was a very wise thing to do because it fed the imagination of all those who thought Bismarck was simply a stalking horse that the king would declare martial law um there were presidents after all Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had turned France into a royal dictatorship by coup d'etat in 1851 now Bismarck's first speech the blood and iron speeches minister-president could easily have been his last and it nearly was informed opinion in the country was shocked and outraged the right wing liberal the most famous is starring of the aged heinrich von kraj Chica wrote to his brother-in-law and i quote you know how passionately I love Prussia but when I hear so shallow a country squire as this Bismarck bragging about iron and blood with which he intends to subdue Germany the meanness of it seems to be exceeded only by the absurdity unquote now much the most important reaction we have no evidence about and it must have happened around the dinner table and possibly in the bedroom assuming that the old couples still shared a bedroom which I tend to doubt but King William had come to the spa Baden Baden after his strenuous and it was a very strenuous period of stress as a result of the of the gridlock which was going on in Berlin after the speech every married person in his room will understand the force of i-told-you-so now I don't know for certain what Queen Augusta said but she hated Bismarck and she would have said to him I told you so had not the Grand Duke of Baden and the King of Saxony and many other dear relatives warned you not to appoint this this scoundrel this dreadful man I told you so and if he turned for help to his English daughter-in-law to the Princess Victoria the favorite child of the Queen he would have heard in England we don't have such people which is also true they had Israeli attractant anyway this kind of battering eventually convinced the king that he'd made a terrible mistake and he said alright I'll go I'll get rid of Bismarck and he was in such a hurry to do it that he didn't wait for the Royal train to come to Barton Barton he just went down to the station and got into the first train going to Berlin to fire Bismarck well Bismarck had already begun to realize that he was in bad trouble so he arranged as prime ministers can to have the train stopped an hour outside of Berlin and there he found the king sitting in a darkened first-class compartment with the light off and his greatcoat up in a terrible mood he goes in and we don't have of course what the King said in fact but we do what we do have and I turned the wrong page he has in his memoirs a wonderful literary description by the memoirs our wonderful novel this big writer quote I begged permission for permission to narrate the events which had occurred during his absence he interrupted me with the words I can perfectly well see where all this is going to end over there in front of the Opera House under my windows they'll cut off your head and mind a little while later when he was silent I answered with a short remark it appraised eeeh I play indeed we'll all be dead answered the king yes I continued then we shall be dead but we ought must all die sooner or later and can we perish more honorably I fighting for my King's cause and your majesty ceiling with your own blood your rights as king by the grace of God Your Majesty is bound to fight you cannot compete as I continue to speak in this sense the King grew more and more animated and began to assume the part of an officer fighting for Kingdom and fatherland end quote crisis over but it was the first of many in 26 years now come back to that minute they were always having crises like this the king was always about to get rid of him and Bismarck always talked his way out Bismarck stayed in office jazz two days later Court phones let sir who had been Bismarck's Legation officer when bismarck was an ambassador in San Petersburg a very witty man with a delightful sense of humor had dinner with Bismarck and I will show you what Bismarck looked like then there is that that's that's the Bismarck whom we're talking about I think that's my favorite portrait oh look at those eyes anyway let me continue with what sir writes in his diary quote we drank a lot of champagne which loosened even his naturally more even more he's naturally loose tongue he exulted about pulling the wool over everybody's eyes parted by himself and partly by others he's seeking to get the king to concede the two-year service period one of the issues between parliament and the crown was a three-year draft or a two-year draft the king wouldn't hear any compromises but Bismarck was always ready to compromise in the House of Lords on the other hand he paints the reaction he plans in college so black that as he puts it the Lord's are becoming anxious about the conditions he says he'll bring about if need be before the gentlemen of the second chamber that is the Parliament he appears at one moment very unbending but the next his desire to mediate and finally intends to make the German cabinets believe that the king is hard put to restate brute reign restrained the Cavour ism of his new minister Cavour who would unified Italy there's no denying that until now people are impressed by his spirit and brilliance Satan arm end quote now the bismarck who appears in flutters account played the game of a consummate confidence man acting apart which varied from scene to scene yet he needed another kind of audience the sirs the Disraeli z-- and other witty and cynical people to whom he could tell the truth how he fooled this one or that one falsehood but honesty kindness and vengeance gargantuan energy and hypochondriac frailty charm and cold remoteness frankness and deceit Bismarck was all of these things and sometimes almost them all of them at once but one attribute never changed anybody who said or did the wrong thing in Bismarck's opinion would finish in outer darkness witty and charming Court phone sir made one joke too many about the mighty Pasha and found himself transferred out of her Lynn to be legations secretary in Rome admittedly it's not Siberia listen I love this quote slette sir ruefully put it in his diary quote Tannhauser end of Act two Otto sings to Rome thou sinner but my first and in some ways most important informant about the real Bismarck was an American John Lothrop motley a year older than Bismarck that same birthday and he had all the self-confidence of a Boston Brahmin you know about Boston this is Boston home of the beam and the card where Cabot speak only two lols and lols be Connelly to God I had a cabin pupil in Cambridge you said you got that wrong the law will speak to us we speak to God he first met bismarck when he was 18 and Bismarck 17 they magnin in where Bismarck and five other girding and freshmen were carousing across the countryside getting drunk in one in after another but he ran into him again under strange circumstance he was walking down the streets of gurchin which I did last month for the first time where Bismarck worked was a fantastic sensation he's walking down the what was now called the Goethe Street it was called something else then he's walking into the center and he sees Bismarck behaving like a maniac challenging everybody shouting at people dressed in a weird way afterwards Bismarck takes him back to his room and takes off his funny clothes and puts him aside and says as follows by the way this is in the novel in the novel the character is called Otto von Raab and mark but it's perfectly clearly Bismarck and the novel was published in three volumes in 1839 I don't know whether in your rare book room in this wonderful library have a copy of the novel called Morton's hope it's not a bad read and it's an insight into Bismarck before he was famous before he was the famous Bismarck of history because in 1839 Bismarck was 24 and motley was 25 I asked my students have you got anybody on campus did you go home and write a novel about and they say no this tells you another thing about Bismarck and this is what Bismarck told motley quote I intend to lead my companions here as I intend to lead them in afterlife you see I'm a very rational sort of person now and you would hardly take me for the crazy mountebank you met in the street half an hour ago but then I see that this is the way to obtain superiority I determined it once on arriving at the University that's a way to obtain mastery over my competitors who were all extravagant savage eccentric was to be ten times as extravagant and savage as anyone else his age at the time of which I am writing was exactly eighteen and a half unquote so it seems to me that Bismarck's desire to dominate was there from the beginning and I also think of I can't prove this that rone who met Bismarck in that same summer when he was 17 must have been impressed with the remarkable character of this kid anyway motley had seen like flood sir the will to dominate and Bismarck kept it behind a charm of speech and manner a delicious it were a reverent sense of humor a wealth a warmth and hospitality that captivated even his opponents they say he bewitched enchanted charmed delighted and fascinated them Disraeli no mean charm himself said he talks like one Tanya Montaigne writes no after the great victories Bismarck is now a key figure and I want to show you the pictures that then come to be drawn of Bismarck but by the way this this is I don't have a picture of Bismarck's an undergraduate but I do have this one this is Marcus a little boy Levin sharp little character wrote wonderful letters and that's Bismarck I don't like this picture much but that's Bismarck at 32 so somewhere in between there that's the Bismarck almot limit that's him at 50 just on the 48th in as chance to the German Reich but this is the Bismarck I want to show you after a certain stage he's always in uniform generals uniform wearing an Iron Cross there as I think my favorite that's a portrait by the great portrait pate of France from LAN bar that is an amazing picture the more you look at it the more complicated it looks there's a kind of melancholy in Bismark sigh but I want to talk at this moment just about the uniforms where did he get them how did he get them and here's a little storage I think is quite entertaining Bismarck never wanted to be a soldier in fact he was something very close to being a draft dodger a fact which the official correspondence of Bismarck published between the early 1920s 1935 of course leave out in January 1838 Bismarck wrote to his father that he'd been trying to evade the draft he tells his father that he has not yet begun his military service because he quote made one last attempt to get out of it as a result quote of muscular weakness which I explained came from a sword cut under the right arm which I feel when I lift it unfortunately the blow was not deep enough you know it reminds me of that old joke I used to be able to raise my arm like this and now I can only raise it like that anyway he did go in and he's yes that's a slow burn you got at me and what happened was that he did his year surfs I don't think he mind there too much he wasn't that he was his coward I think like that quite the country he didn't want to be bored and as anybody who did national service and served when I'm looking I'm sure quite a lot a lot of you did it can be pretty boring in the army but the problem was that when he became ambassador at the court of the Czar he felt a shame that he would have to go in the uniform of a reserve lieutenant Prussian Yonkers took every occasion to wear uniform and Bismarck insisted on one even though he had only served was as we saw very briefly and he made a tremendous fuss until Edwin phone Montoya Lee didn't want to do it gave him the titular rank of Major in the chorus yay now how Bismarck got the generals uniforms you've seen I have no idea I don't know how he got them but what I do know is that during the franco-prussian war Bismarck showed up on the 30th 31st of July 1870 in the headquarters of the King at mines kitted out in uniform of a major general of the reserve a spiked helmet of a heavy cavalry and huge leather hip boots a ridiculous and unmilitary figure the real soldiers ridiculing him that becomes clear from the wonderful diaries of Lieutenant Colonel power of bronze art from Shaolin Dorf who was called a demi garden Maliki the the Field Marshal was God and he had three staff officers who were the demigods and runs up from shell Germans do make jokes you know bronze art from Shaolin Dorf was one of the demigods and he said quote the civil servant in the Qura see a jacket becomes more impudent every day whatever the soldiers might think Bismarck did become the mythical figure that you saw in those pictures and thus the myth of Bismarck grew and he did his best to extend it a group of court painters created a historical reconstruction in which Bismarck's role stood out there's another general I like that one now this is a very very famous there are several versions of this and it's an interesting picture this is the Kaiser being crowned in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on January the 18th 1871 painted by antiphon vana who was then the greatest historical historicizing painter he painted several versions of this but this one is from 1882 eleven years later and there you see in the middle Bismarck's standing in his white uniform it's his triumph now since this lecture is devoted to myth and man I would now like to tell you what really happened because it's extremely funny we have the Diaries and nobody reads them of Prince Frederick William the Crown Prince and that by the way is another story sometimes somebody really ought to write a biography of him he was a great general he was by far the best general in 1870 in 1866 and he was the Crown Prince something happened to him it was a tragedy when he came to the throne in 1888 he was already dying of cancer and he was on the throne for ninety nine days but well before that I think there's evidence of clinical depression and somebody should write a biography this is a really tragic figure a wonderful diarist and I'd like to read you his account of how Germany was actually unified the issue was what to call the Emperor there was a petition from the Parliament which said they wanted Germany to become an empire the Bavarians and the other South Germans would not wear Emperor of Germany so Bismarck cut a deal with them and said okay you won't do that he'll be called German emperor the king did not want to be Emperor he did not want to be anything he was King of Prussia that's what he was that was his identity he was William the first King of Prussia and he certainly didn't want to be some newfangled German Emperor the result is they had one of their colossal rouse the king was in tears etc etc the Crown Prince recites all this in some detail as a result they could not decide until a day before whether there would be a coronation and if so what form it would take now even in an efficient institution like this I should think the Events Director would like a bit more than one day to make the arrangements Bismarck was in a foul temper because he'd had one of his rouse with the King and every time he had a round with the king he would put himself to bed or do something like that or become ill anyway the thing was so hurriedly done that many of the officers including the Crown Prince could not get into gala but appeared in service boots and field dress fatigues we used to call them no rehearsal had been possible and the order up to the man off helmets for prayer had been forgotten and the Crown Prince only rembered at the last moment and shouted it out chaplain raga pastor and potsdam and Ron's brother-in-law gave the krint sprint said a rather tactless and tedious historical disquisition after the tedium in a simple address by the King William followed by the assembled Prince's moved back to a special platform where they stood on either side and here is the crown prince's account in his diary of what happened next count Bismarck came forward looking in the grimmest of humours and read out in an expressionless businesslike way and without any trace of warmth or feeling for the occasion the address to the German people at the word enlarger of the Empire I noticed a quiver stir the whole assemblage which otherwise stood there without a word then the Grand Duke of Baden came forward with unaffected quiet dignity that is so peculiarly his and with uplifted hand cried in loud voice long live his Imperial Majesty the Emperor William a thundering hurrah at last repeat repeated six times repeated shook the room while the flags and standards waved over the head of the new Emperor of Germany right thus Bismarck lived the moment of his greatest triumph the proclamation of the German Empire in a foul temper and that was clear to everybody in the Hall of Mirrors lucía's from bal housing who was one of Bismarck's cabinet officers said later and i quote his majesty took the opposition to the title so badly german emperor then on the day of the proclamation of the empire he cut bismarck completely when he came down from the podium didn't speak to him so much for Anton phone where Vera's representation the myth and the reality the people who were there weren't very pleased Prince Otto of Bavaria heir to the throne said quote I cannot even describe to you how infinitely sad and hurt I felt during the ceremony everything was so cold so proud so glittering so showy and staggering and heartless and empty unquote but the comment I really liked was a young young prince of Schwartzberg zonda house and who was a rather pretty young lad and there was known as the prince of arcadia and when he came in to the robing room to get his special gala dress on he addressed the fellow princes greetings to you fellow vassals now I want to tell you another picture which is again interesting and this is Bismarck at his greatest the greatest diplomat of the age and that's the Congress of Berlin in June July 1878 and all the figures are identified if you start with the left the large man standing behind the chair that's a prince cuddly the austro-hungarian ambassador to Berlin the remember the white hair sitting in a chair is gorchakov the Russian Chancellor the man in the gray suit leaning forward is Disraeli of course Bismarck is greeting Prince sue Olaf who was the Russian ambassador in st. Petersburg and was actually his favorite Russian diplomat and standing at his shoulder is calculus and Rossi of the austro-hungarian Foreign Minister and in the back you can just see between the two Turks there is the tall man with the beard that's Lord Salisbury and to his left with the glasses Oh doh Russell the British ambassador to Berlin the Berlin Congress was it was one of Bismarck's fantastic crimes he did the whole thing himself without any staff he composed all the documents in English French and German his English was absolutely beautiful and he dominated everything and this is a quote from a letter from Disraeli to one of his admirers in England which gives you an idea of what Bismarck was like I quote Bismarck soraa's above all he six-foot-four I should think proportionately stout with a sweet and gentle voice and with a peculiar refined enunciation which singularly contrasts with the awful things he says appalling from their frankness and their audacity he's a complete despot here and from the highest to the lowest of oppressions and all the permanent foreign diplomacy tremble at his frown and court most sedulous Lee his smile he loads me with kindness though often preoccupied with an immediate dissolution of Parliament on his hands an internecine war with the Socialists hundreds of whom he puts daily into prison in defiance of all law he yesterday extracted for me the promise that before I depart I will once more dine with him quite alone and if I had time and knew the patience I would love to read you Israelis accounts of going to dinner by himself at Bismarck's house nobody else ever did that the Bismarck's didn't invite people much to the house in figured it was a state dinner but to go to a family dinner and sit in Bismarck study and smoke with him which Disraeli said was about to destroy the last bit of his health is an incredible thing and then I want to show you this this is Bismarck's public Bismarck had a public of one I was recently asked by a German newspaper to write a comparison of Bismarck and angle of miracle and it's they have a lot in common although it's not obvious that's part of the problem Bismarck had a public of one the constitution of 1850 was so designed that the king still had enough absolute powers that as long as the king did not fire Bismarck Bismarck was in power Angela Merkel has other things to deal with and the thing that fascinated me in I think justifies biography is that you need to understand the relationship between Bismarck in this King for 26 years rau after round after round the King never could never got rid of him they would have these tremendous rouse Bismarck would resign on the most trivial of circumstances he resigned once when the cabinet refused to accept of the appointment of a Hanoverian to be Postmaster General a person so obscure that he's not in any one of the German dictionaries of national biography on the 22nd of February 1869 he resigned because one of his enemies an ambassador in Italy had been slack because the counter organization plan was moving too slowly and because the king and queen disapproved of the the fine he had imposed on the city of Frankfurt after the franco-prussian war the man who changed European history would submit his resignation over things like that he told Rome I am at the end of my capacities and cannot hold out spiritually in the battles against the king but what battles the king wrote to him and said how can you imagine that I would even think of exceeding to your idea it is my greatest happiness that's underlined three times in the original to live with you and to thoroughly agree with you how can you be so hypochondriac Kings word as to allow one single difference to mislead you into taking the extreme step your name stands higher in Prussian history than that of any other Prussian statesman and time to let that man go never quiet and prayer underlined twice will adjust everything your most faithful friend underlined three times it's touching isn't it I think when you loved him I don't say it my books it's the but I'll say it here off the record I think William loved him I think they I think he was Williams good son whereas Crown Prince Frederick William with his English wife and his liberal ideas was the bad son and I think that triangle which I'm not really drawn the book I really was since this is a friendly audience I'll tell you I really think that's what's going on now what about Bismarck at home modest life without any kind of pretension Bismarck received his visitors in a plane furnished office of medium-size Auto flan sir said no provincial prefect in France would have been satisfied with such modest surroundings he had a wife Johanna oops there she is at the age of 31 but this is the one that really tells you what she was like there she is aged 69 one of the things that Johanna never did she would never address like a proper society lady she refused from the moment Bismarck became ambassador to cooperate miss she never learned French she was what she was baron von Holstein said princess Bismarck although she looked like a cook all her life and had not the slightest idea how to cook or any rate to give dinner parties most unfair her neighbor my favorite informant baroness von Smithson Berg wrote in her diary in November 18 7018 87 on hearing that the Bismarck's were to make a rare appearance at court I quote 16 November the bees go to court a great event I would like to see the old rag that the dear lady pulls from her clothes closet and happiest can be puts it on what Johanna and Otto had in common was hating they both were tremendous haters one morning Bismarck came down and his Kristoff Tiedemann said did your highness sleep well and Bismarck said chapter gansan August I spent the whole night hating you can see why I had a good time with this book and one of the people he hated was this wonderful beautiful lady my favorite that's Mimi SH line it's Mimi's line it's was the wife of Bismarck's former boss who had been briefly foreign minister a very distinguished aristocrat and she was one of three sisters three very beautiful social sisters this is Elaine Bach portrait and lain Bach really know how to give portraits of women it's a wonderful wonderful painter not very well known anymore anyway the second sister Princess Elizabeth von Kahr oullette had married a great psilocin magnet and she'd fall in love with Herbert von Bismarck Bismarck's eldest son and they decided to run off together now she was Catholic she was in the process of getting a divorce and that was bad but what was really bad is that Mimi and Elizabeth and the third sister Chloe were part of Bismarck's enemies now what that exactly meant in his mind I have no idea I can't imagine what they could have done him but to have these three women members of his family was unthinkable and so both Joanna and Bismarck flatly refused to allow Herbert to get married and they controlled him in all sorts of ways Herbert left Elizabeth who nearly committed suicide and Venice his he was broken she was broken and that was the end in some sense of Herbert's proper life one more thing is you've been very patient I just want to give you a little bit of Bismarck's home life and then I will stop because I think we want to have some questions this is the second occasion on which Christoph Tiedemann went to Bismarck's house for reasons that I can't figure out and neither could he he was plucked from among the National Liberal Party in 1875 to be Bismarck's first private secretary Bismarck Adan everything between 1862 and 75 without a proper secretary it's amazing this is the text of the thing 25 January an interesting day from five to eleven in the Bismarck house the prince complained about poor appetite hats off I'd like to see him once with good appetite he took second helpings from every course and complained about ill treatment when the princes protested energetically against the enjoyment of a Boar's Head an apse aspic he sipped the wine but drank lots of beer from a large silver tankard about 7:30 the prince invited ruble that was the other guests hydrophones Abel famous his star in a member of parliament and me to follow him to his study as a precaution he offered us his bedroom which was next to the study as a place to relieve ourselves sorry about this I know it's a family show but we went in and found under the bed for two objects we sought which were of colossal dimensions as we stationed ourselves at the wall rupal spoke seriously and from the depth of his heart everything about the man is great even his now I can't for bear to do it's like now the other side of his mark on his most loyal friend Albrecht von rone died in 1879 and this is the last slide I want to show you this is a remarkable man one of my favorite character I admire him enormously I haven't got time to explain why but here we see aside a Bismarck's personality which is one of the least attractive general Albrecht von rone has put Bismarck in power of that there's no doubt there's correspondence of which he says to his best friend but that is my historical greatness I put Bismarck in power there's no doubt about that he was the most loyal decent honorable soldier imaginable he was so loyal to Bismarck that one of the demigods said of him he was a farmer Asst which the oxford english dictionary defines as an attendant especially on a scholar or a magician a magician and this is the paragraph that Bismarck devotes in his memoirs to his faithful friend quote Rouen was the most competent of my colleagues he could not to get along with others he treated them as a regiment which he marched too long the colleagues in due course complained about this and I had to take over the Ministry of State again unquote in three lines Bismarck shows gross ingratitude and one outrageous lie Bismarck patron in the office of a minister president 1872 Rome was already ill because he was in rage and the following year when he'd calmed down he took it back and Rowan left of course because he did not want to be Minister president and then there's more stuff but I I realize I've written too much let me that this close I've always thought that Bismarck was the most interesting and complex figure of the 19th century Theodore Fontana my favorite German novelist sort of Jane Austen of the Bismarck era wrote to his wife in 1884 when Bismarck sneezes or says prosit it's more interesting than a spoken wisdom of six progressives but if you ask me now after all this time I haven't written this book and your kind patience if you ask me what Bismarck was really like or what he really wanted I don't know thank you very much

Channel: The Kansas City Public Library

Views: 18,819

Keywords: Kansas City Public Library, Otto von Bismark, Jonathan Steinberg, Bismark: A Life, history

Id: pw47NhDR4zw

Length: 50min 40sec (3040 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2013