Family and Schooling

On 1 April 1815 Otto von Bismarck was born on his father’s estate at Shönhausen, a few miles east of the Elbe, as Europe’s statesmen grappled with Napoleon’s Hundred Days. Bismarck’s father was from an old Junker family who had lived on their estates for 500 years, though, while distinguished, they were not one of the grandest families of the old aristocracy. His forefathers were born, lived and died in the same rooms for centuries. His mother, Wilhelmine Mencken, was descended from a long line of academics and officials. Her father had served Prussian kings as a senior adviser, including cabinet secretary to Frederick the Great at the age of 30, and senior adviser to Friedrich Wilhelm III. She grew up playing with the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV and Wilhelm I as children though her father’s early death suddenly changed her circumstances. Beautiful and highly intelligent, aged 17 she married the older Junker. His mother’s influence and connections meant he grew up knowing the royal family well. He clearly inherited his mother’s brains.

Biographies portray his childhood love for an unintellectual Junker father and his love of the countryside in contrast to bitterness and resentment felt towards a cold, intellectual, cosmopolitan mother who took him to hated schools in the city. His father exercised feudal powers on his estates including acting as a judge and appointing pastors and teachers. He loved hunting but mismanagement of his estates brought financial trouble.

His first five years were spent at his father’s estates at Shönhausen and Kniephof. In 1822 the family leased their estates and moved to Berlin. He hated the first school she sent him to aged six, the Plamann Anstalt in Berlin, for children of civil servants, where he was beaten as if he were in a ‘prison’. In 1827 at the age of 12, he went to the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin and from 1830 to 1832 (aged 17) he moved to the Grey Cloister Gymnasium also in Berlin (the latter he enjoyed more than the first two). During winter he and his brother lived in the family’s townhouse with their parents, in the summer on their own with a housekeeper and a schoolmaster.

His family life was largely unhappy because of his mother. ‘I became a stranger in my parents’ house in earliest childhood and never again felt fully at home there’. He told his fiancée (23 February 1847), ‘My mother was a beautiful woman, who loved external elegance, who possessed a bright, lively intelligence, but little of what the Berliner calls Gemüth [‘warm heart’, JS]. She wished that I should learn much and become much, and it often appeared to me that she was hard, cold toward me. As a small child I hated her, later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods. One only learns the value of the mother for the child when it is too late, when she is dead. The most modest maternal love, even when mixed with much selfishness, is still enormous compared with the love of the child. Nowhere perhaps have I sinned more grievously than against my parents, above all against my mother… I really loved my father. When not with him I felt remorse concerning my conduct toward him and made resolutions that I was unable to keep for the most part. How often did I repay his truly boundless, unselfish, good-natured tenderness for me with coldness and bad grace? Even more frequently I made a pretence of loving him, not wanting to violate my own code of propriety, when inwardly I felt hard and unloving because of his apparent weakness. I was not in a position to pass judgement on those weaknesses, which annoyed me only when coupled with gaucherie. And yet I cannot deny that I really loved him in my heart. I wanted to show you how much it oppresses me when I think about it.’

According to Pflanze, the words above about his mother were ‘a sop’ to his fiancée. For the rest of his life he spoke of her only with resentment and complained about her taking him away from the beloved countryside. Her coldness comes through in a letter to Bismarck’s older brother in which she expressed her previous hopes for his intellectual growth and ended, ‘The time for these hopes to be fulfilled has arrived but they have disappeared and unfortunately, I must confess, for ever.’ (Not a lovely letter to get from one’s mother.) The younger brother, Otto, advised the older that their parents were ‘more susceptible to lies and diplomacy than to soldierly coarseness’. He later complained that his mother felled a beloved stand of oak trees at Kniephof.

‘Up to the age of six I was always in the fresh air or in the stables. An old cowherd warned me once not to creep around under the cows so trustingly. The cow, he said, can tread on your eye. The cow notices nothing and goes on chewing but the eye is then gone. I have often thought about that later when people, without noticing it, do harm to others… At the age of six I entered a school whose teachers were demagogic Turner who hated the nobility and educated with blows and cuffs instead of words and reproofs. In the morning the children were awakened with rapier blows that left bruises, because it was too burdensome for the teachers to do it any other way. Gymnastics was supposed to be recreation, but during this too the teachers struck us with iron rapiers. For my cultivated mother, child rearing was too inconvenient and she freed herself of it very early, at least in her feelings’ (to Keudell while en route to Leipzig, 18 June 1864).

He later wrote that ‘My childhood was ruined for me at the Plamann Institute which to me seemed like a prison. Whenever I looked out of the [school] window and saw oxen ploughing I had to weep with homesickness.’ The school had bad food and harsh punishments. The boys were driven out of bed at 6am and forced into ‘a kind of hothouse development of the intellect rather than the education of the heart and the preservation of youthful vigour’.

He described the views he ‘imbibed with his mother’s milk’ as ‘liberal rather than reactionary’. He wrote in his Memoirs: ‘I left school at Easter 1832 a normal product of our state system of education, a Pantheist, and, if not a Republican, at least with the persuasion that the Republic was the most rational form of government; reflecting too upon the causes which could decide millions of men permanently to obey one man, when all the while I was hearing from grown up people much bitter or contemptuous criticism of their rulers.’

He took with him some ‘German national impressions’ which, though, were ‘not strong enough to extirpate my innate Prussian monarchical sentiments. My historical sympathies remained on the side of authority. To my childish ideas of justice Harmodius and Aristogeiton were criminals.’ Pflanze writes that some of his adult attitudes may have been formed by these early years: his contempt for men pushed around by their wives, his dislike of intellectuals, hostility to the bureaucracy, his late rising from bed and his strong preference for the country over the city.

The German universities were the best in Europe and Albert rightly took them as a model when he unsuccessfully tried to reform Oxford and Cambridge (AJPT). They had little influence on Bismarck. He began at Gottingen in May 1832. At university the republican and liberal students repelled him with their bad manners and refusal to duel: ‘their want of breeding in externals and of acquaintance with the forms and manners of good society’, and ‘the extravagance of their political views, based upon a lack of either culture or knowledge of the conditions of life which historical causes had brought into existence… Their ideas gave me the impression of an association between Utopian theories and defective breeding… I returned to Berlin with less liberal opinions than when I quitted it.’

He spent his time mainly with the boozy aristocrats and made the only two great friendships of his life, with Alexander Keyserling (who encouraged his love of Beethoven) and the American John Motley (who encouraged his love of Shakespeare), for whom he would drop the affairs of the world decades later and talk as old student friends. He drank enormously, according to Keyserling he whored a fair amount, and fought perhaps 25 duels in three semesters (after the only one he lost he claimed his opponent cheated). In 1852, he was involved in a duel with a political antagonist, von Vincke.

He spent little time in lectures and studying though he read widely. According to Gall, he did courses in law, philosophy, the history of political science and mathematics. He was not interested in the classics, philosophy or German idealism. He enjoyed Goethe and Schiller but they did not change his life (Pflanze). He learned French and English fluently. He loved Byron and Shakespeare and preferred Beethoven to Mozart. AJP Taylor wrote that he loathed the company of intellectuals and writers ‘yet only Luther and Goethe rank with him as masters of German prose’ and his speeches ‘are among the greatest literary compositions in the German language.’ Pflanze says that maths and natural sciences did not influence him.

Gall (p9) says that the only university course and lectures that really got Bismarck’s interest was that of Professor Heeren, a non-idealist professor of trade and international relations, influenced by Adam Smith and Montesquieu, who focused on the specific details of trade and their connection to politics and foreign policy. Goethe said his Thoughts on Politics, Communications, and Trade among the Principal Peoples of the Ancient World was one of the most important books of the age. His lectures stressed the economic and commercial foundations of foreign policy.

He crammed for his law exams and left university in 1835. His parents wanted him to pursue a military career. He did not. Aged twenty in June 1835, he wrote that, ‘My life, looked at closely, is really rather pitiful. By day I pursue studies that do not interest me. My evenings I spend in the company of courtiers and civil servants, affecting a delight I am not Schulenburg enough to feel or to seek. I find it hard to believe that the most complete achievement of my chosen goal, the longest title and the largest medal in Germany, or the most stupendous distinction will indemnify me for the physically and spiritually shrunken beat that will be the product of this life. I am still frequently visited by the desire to swap the pen for the plough and the briefcase for the game bag. But that is something I can always still do.’

In his three decades of command, he avoided the country estates of his own class and the city life of the intellectual classes he mostly despised. He worked with extreme intensity interspersed with long periods of solitary reflection deep in the countryside with his family and few guests. Great shifts in policy came after solitary brooding, often in the countryside. Almost the only people he seems to have genuinely cared for were his own family yet he ruined his elder son’s happiness by forbidding his marriage into a family of political enemies.

He was a monarchist but not an absolutist. While he often spoke in feudal terms about his attitude to Wilhelm, he also spoke in the most cynical terms about the ‘unhistorical, Godless unjust sovereignty swindle’ of German princes claiming ‘legitimacy’. He saw himself as a man of the king and state who stood above parties seeking without fear or favour the best interests of Prussia.

1874 he told the Prussian Parliament, ‘I am a disciplined statesman who subordinates himself to the total needs and requirements of the state in the interest of peace and the welfare of my country.’

He also hated the bureaucracy. He thought some sort of parliament should counterbalance the monarchy and the bureaucracy. Initially he thought it should be chosen by estates — a representative body based on occupational and interest groups, with landowners dominant — and able only to talk, not pass laws. Though he sometimes praised the British Parliamentary system, the thing he probably liked most about it was its organic, rather than rationalist, nature. He always opposed what was the heart of the British system - ultimate Parliamentary control of finance and taxes.

I will write some blogs on his general character and ‘lessons’ that can be abstracted from the intricate story below. See the Introduction on my blog for a few thoughts on this.