German Militarism and the Virtues of Hypocrisy

Review of Bismarck: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg

Otto von Bismarck gave his most famous speech on September 30, 1862, in front of the Budget Committee of the Prussian House of Representatives. It concluded that,

Prussia must build up and preserve her strength for the advantageous moment, which has already come and gone many times. Her borders under the treaties 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 1849 — but by blood and iron.

The phrase “blood and iron,” like Bismarck the man, has come to symbolize either a wise realism about the way the world works, in a descriptive sense, or an affinity for an unsentimental approach to politics. In Bismarck: A Life, Jonathan Steinberg points out that although the sentiments of that speech weren’t all that different from what he was already telling anyone who would listen in private, it was widely condemned among the Prussian elite, and if William I had decided to dismiss his President-Minister at the time he would have been forgotten by history, and Germany would never have been unified. In the decades after leaving office, however, Bismarck became a national hero up through the two world wars.

Nonetheless, in January 1871, on the eve of the Prussian army bombarding Paris, the Crown Prince Fredrick wrote in his diary,

We are deemed capable of every wickedness and the distrust of us grows more and more pronounced. Nor is this the consequence of this War only — so far has the theory, initiated by Bismarck and for years holding the stage, of ‘Blood and Iron’ brought us! What good to us is all power, all martial glory and renown, if hatred and mistrust meet us at every turn, if every step we advance in our development is a subject for suspicion and grudging? Bismarck has made us great and powerful but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and — our conscience.

Perhaps the main value of Steinberg’s biography is the insights it provides into the politics and culture of nineteenth century Germany. I would guess that maybe a quarter of the book consists of direct quotes taken from letters to and from Bismarck and those who knew him. The biographer provides the background and context for what happened, but more than most authors simply lets the major figures speak for themselves.

Bismarck in cuirassier uniform (1875). According to Steinberg, he “had only tenuous claims to the uniforms he always wore — to the embarrassment or fury of ‘real’ soldiers.”

If you’re like me, your main reference point for history is the Anglo-American past. From that perspective, German conservatism is a completely alien culture, and one that was far from completely dominant even under the reign of Bismarck. That’s not to say that Germany itself is that culturally distant; much to Bismarck’s chagrin, free elections after unification often led to victories for classical liberals, socialists, and moderate Catholic parties, results that weren’t all that different from what has historically been observed in most Western democracies. And, as indicated above, even members of the royal family opposed Bismarck’s amoral approach to politics. But unlike France, the UK, and the US, Germany is distinguished for maintaining a powerful monarchy and a portion of the elite that was self-consciously conservative — and not in the Anglo-American sense — well into the twentieth century. I don’t think the experiment worked out well, despite impressive economic growth and scientific, technological and cultural achievements in the years during and after Bismarck’s reign. Whether or not one thinks that Germany deserves most of the blame for the First World War, and I think it does, it clearly had a terrible first half of the twentieth century.