The Heritage of Bismarck



One man is usually associated with the creation of the great German state of the last half of the nineteenth century. And that is as it should be. Otto von Bismarck was, as much as any one man can be responsible for any historical event, the architect of a united Germany.

I. The Man


"My highest ambition is to make the Germans a nation," he said on several occasions before 1871, and he succeeded. He was responsible for the political strategy that led to unification, and he guided the united Germany during its first twenty years.

Bismarck stamped the new national German state with its own political principles, and he marked the character of the people within the state. He was born at Schönhausen in Brandenburg in 1815, the year of Waterloo. Schönhausen was situated a short distance east of the Elbe, and Bismarck was a man who looked both to the German east and the German west. He knew the world of the Prussian Junker, the landowning military caste, that stretched eastward into Pomerania and Silesia. But he was not a Junker, nor a narrow provincial who knew nothing of or cared nothing for what lay beyond the confines of Prussia. He was a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, who had an understanding of European life.

II. Theory of Government


The empire which Bismarck created was organized from the top down. The emperor was a hereditary leader who was responsible only to God and was the source of all executive power. His was a form of transcendental authority. As a practical matter the emperor expressed his leadership through a single minster, the Reich Chancellor. From 1871 to 1890 this was Bismarck. The German state was not a despotism, and the German citizen was not terrorized.

The emperor voluntarily imposed upon himself certain restrictions in his relations with his subjects, and there was widespread belief in Germany that emperor and citizens were united in pursuing common goals. The government was to provide security, order, and a direction in which Germany would move. The citizen were to use this security and this order to develop their talents. The government was to ensure the unified integration of all social will and action with a view to preserving the social whole and all its essential parts. By such an arrangement, "the whole nation achieves unity and individuality." Bismarck himself, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity, expressed the argument in these words: "I am convinced that it is the duty of any honest government always to strive for the greatest measure of popular and individual freedom which is compatible with the security and common welfare of the state."

Bismarck assumed, and so did many other Germans, that within the German Empire there could be no meaningful conflict between the rights of the citizen and the rights of the state. The aims of the individual and the state were the same, and any dispute was artificial. There was thus no need for any separation of powers within the state, each watching and checking on the other. There was no reason to distrust the state, for the emperor, the government, the bureaucracy, and the army marched with the people and expressed the aspirations and goals of the people themselves.

For Bismarck, the health and progress of the state, as he saw it, was the principal purpose of his policy. He was not a man who cared about causes or hypothetical principles. His concern was to make the instrument he controlled-first Prussia and then Germany-as strong as possible. In 1881, in a speech in the Reichstag, the German legislative assembly, he expressed very well his basic political program,

"I have often acted hastily and without reflection, but when l had time to think I have always asked, What is useful, effective, right, for the fatherland. I have never been a doctrinaire. Liberal, reactionary, conservative . . . these, I confess, seem to me luxuries. Give me a strong German state, and then ask me whether it should have more or less liberal furnishings, and you'll find that I answers Yes, I have no fixed opinions, make proposals. Many roads lead to Rome. Sometimes one may rule liberally, and sometimes dictatorially, there are no eternal rules. My only aim has been the creation and consolidation of Germany."

But Germany must exhibit a united will, and there must be agreement on the activities undertaken by the state on behalf of all. Bismarck once asked the rhetorical question, What kind of government would you have if it contained a Catholic, a socialist, and a conservative? At another time be wailed that "political parties will be the ruin of our constitution and our future." Authority must not be fragmented, and this emphasis upon unity forced Bismarck into the attempt to rid Germany of any influence strong enough to compete with him for the allegiance of Germans.

III. Kulturkampf


He engaged in a long and ultimately fruitless attack upon the Catholic church because he believed that German Catholics could give only a fraction of their allegiance to the German state and must reserve some part of their loyalties to a non-German authority. He harassed Catholicism as a "state within a state." In 1873 Bismarck had laws enacted

1.      that reduced the disciplinary powers of the Catholic bishops,

2.      brought the education of the Catholic clergy under the supervision of the state,

3.      made it easy for congregations to secede from the Catholic church, and

4.      provided methods whereby there could be appeals made from ecclesiastical courts to secular courts of law.


Church leaders who refused to acknowledge the new laws were imprisoned, including the Archbishop of Posen, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the Bishop of Treves. Within Prussia measures were even stricter.

1) All religious orders except those concerned with caring for the sick were ordered dissolved,
2) the state made appointments to vacant church positions, and
3) civil marriage was made compulsory.

Catholics fought back. Instead of weakening the affection of German Catholics for their church, Bismarck's actions strengthened the Catholic community. Bismarck realized that the policy had been a failure, and he retreated. The election of a new Pope in 1878 provided an opportunity to end the struggle between church and state. The anti-catholic laws were gradually abandoned, and by the latter half of the eighteen-eighties the last legal traces of the struggle had disappeared. But the attempt to suppress Catholic activity had an opposite effect from that desired by Bismarck.

A strong Catholic political party became permanent in Germany, and Catholic political leaders were continual irritants to Bismarck. He never overcame his suspicions. In 1884, in a speech, he argued that the catholic party "has this danger for me. One cannot cooperate with it without selling oneself. One is taken with it completely, and the moment always comes when the question arises: Will you fight now or will you continue to go along with me?" And then he stated the basic problem. One could not trust the Catholics, although many of them were "good honest Germans," because "the center of gravity" of much of Catholic life "lies outside the German Reich."

IV. Anti-Socialist Legislation


As Bismarck attempted to root out Catholic influence in Germany, so he moved for generally similar reasons against the socialists. In the eighteen-seventies the socialist party showed an amazing increase in electoral strength, and Bismarck, who saw socialism as another subversive movement designed to weaken the state, attempted to suppress it. He described the socialists as "robbers and thieves." He accused them of wishing to

"turn everything in Germany upside down, above all the army and compulsory service, not caring if the Reich is left without defense."

In 1878 an anti-socialist law was passed by the Reichstag. The Provisions of the law gave the authorities great discretionary powers:

·         Public meetings were banned,

·         political organizations were ordered dissolved,

·         books and other publications were suppressed.


Bismarck is reported to have said at the time of the passage of the law, "now for the pig-sticking." The law was applied with severity. Leaders of the party were attacked, over 150 periodicals were suppressed, and over l,500 persons were arrested. The anti-socialist law was renewed at its expiration and again every two years thereafter until 1890.

But, as with the struggle with the Catholics, Bismarck failed. The socialist party continued to grow, and in 1890 the anti-Socialist law was allowed to lapse. By 1912 the socialists were the largest single political party in the Reichstag, supported 110 daily newspapers throughout Germany and had created a nationwide system of fraternal organizations, youth groups, and assorted clubs in which members participated.

As Bismarck bad feared, the socialists did remain an alien group within the society. After Bismarck's death the socialists were still being attacked as "the party of hostility" and as "the deadly enemy of the national state." The socialists were, at least in their doctrine and in their official statements, opposed to Bismarck's Germany. In 1903, a socialist leader said, "I want to remain the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order so as to undermine it and, if I can, to eliminate it."

V. Resignation


By 1890 Bismarck's relations with the new German emperor, William II, bad become strained. In March of that year he submitted his resignation as chancellor. It was accepted by the emperor, and Bismarck's career as leader of Germany was over. He retired to his estate, where he wrote his memoirs. But more importantly he engaged in a series of rather petty controversies with old and new enemies, and refought old battles for the benefit of the many who came to visit him. In 1898 he died.

VI. Bismarck's Place in History


In nineteenth-century European history only Napoleon can be compared with Bismark as an influential and successful political personality. Bismarck gave political meaning to the idea of being German, and he created a prosperous and respected German state. In 1849 a German historian had written that "the power or weakness of Germany determines the fate of Europe." Bismarck's Germany was an important factor in the international stability that characterized Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

A. Positive Legacy


Bismarck was not an adventurer. When the unity of Germany was achieved, his efforts in international affairs were largely directed to maintaining the peace of Europe. He brought about a reconciliation of Germany and Austria, he established alliances with Austria and Italy, and he was always careful to avoid any action that would antagonize England. He knew that France remained embittered by the results of the war of 1870-1871, and he attempted to keep her isolated and without powerful allies.

He ridiculed the idea of Germany becoming a colonial power. He would have nothing to do with any suggestion that Germany enter into naval competition with England. He claimed that Germany was satisfied and had no territorial claims on anyone. When Bismarck retired as chancellor, Germany was the greatest military power in the world, her industrial progress was unmatched by any other country, she was a pioneer in social legislation, and her people were healthy, prosperous, and proud members of an orderly and largely admired nation.

B. Negative Legacy


Yet this Germany contained features that detracted from its accomplishments. Bismarck left Germany saddled with a Junker military aristocracy. This was a violation of Bismarck's own principles of avoiding the creation of "a state within a state." The Junker military aristocracy went its own way with few restraints exercised by the community as a whole. The claim of German military men that they were elevated to austere, dedicated service could not disguise their "hollow greatness," their taste for force and coercion, and their intellectual barrenness. All Western countries faced the problem of civilian political control and military organization. But in Germany the freedom of the military from civilian direction was almost complete.

Bismarck also left the country confronting the perils of political irresponsibility. The emperor was all-powerful. Germany entered the twentieth century with an unrestrained aristocratic ruler who could threaten the welfare and even the existence of the nation through whim and lack of judgment. One non-neutral commentator maintained that

"government by an irresponsible monarchy and an agrarian aristocracy was not enough. Bismarck's magnificently brilliant creation was a structure as ephemeral, as temporary, as the genius that created it. It was, indeed, only a puppet show after all, a magical construction that had no healthy life of its own, and that, once it had escaped from the control of its creator, was doomed to self-destruction. The bureaucracy and the army gave an illusion of order that concealed the strange, arbitrary quality of German leadership."

In 1912 an Englishmen noticed this feature of the German state and said, not without some malice:

"When you mount to the peak of this highly organized people, you will find not only confusion, but chaos."

More important than the organizational problem, however, was Bismarck's legacy of state power and individual weakness. Bismarck did make Germany great and the German citizen small. The German State became a "far-seeing guardian of all the interests of the state and people," but individual Germans failed to develop what could be called civil courage, the courage of one's own convictions as a civilian. As a famous German historian wrote in 1899:

"In my innermost being and with the best that is in me I have always been a political animal and have always desired to be a citizen. In our nation that is not possible, for with us the individual man, even the best among us, never rises above doing his duty in the ranks and above political fetishism."

Bismarck also left Germany with the dangerous belief in power and force. There appeared no limit to what Germany could do if she willed it. But there must be no "cowardly pacifist mooning" or "silly scruples over legality." Germany must always be the hammer and never the anvil, and she must avoid the "poison of sentimental humanitarianism." Thus he "left Germany with a taste for hero-worship, with a tradition of political opportunism and of the unprincipled use of force".

Germany became something of a European bully, and her leaders' habit of speaking in terms of force and power grated upon the nerves of other Europeans. As the Polish-English novelist, Joseph Conrad, wrote,

"The Germanic Tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly logical, in tones Hegelian, Nietzschean, warlike, pious, cynical, inspired, what they were going to do to the inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and unworthiness."

Although he exaggerated, George Bernard Shaw expressed a common attitude when he wrote that Europe became "sore-headed and fed-up" with Germany.

"We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian militarism and its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense, and we just rose up and went for it."

Bismarck must be held at least partially responsible for the German feeling of being unique and separate from the rest of Western society. He stimulated the idea that the German people and German culture must be safeguarded against pernicious influences from abroad. German nationalism turned inward, not out upon the world. As a scholar remarked, the Germans were not prepared to contribute to the

"highest and most sacred values of mankind, the liberty, honor, right, and dignity of the individual, that great central purpose that drew all the vital forces of Western Civilization together."

Perhaps a fitting summary of Bismarck's career is contained in an article by Max Weber, the German sociologist, written in 1917:

"As his political heritage, Bismarck left a nation without political education. Above all, he left a nation without political will, accustomed to permit the great statesman at its head to care for its policy. Moreover, he left a nation accustomed to submit, under the name of constitutional monarchy, to whatever was decided for it, without criticizing the political qualifications of those who now occupied Bismarck's place and who now took the reins of power in their hands."



Send comments and questions to Professor Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.