Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck (1815-1898). He is one of the most prominent figures of the XIXth century, and perhaps my favorite one: his brilliance, charisma and unscrupulousness are comparable to those of a handful of other personalities (like Julius Caesar, Henry VIII of England, Metternich, Wilhelm I of Prussia, Cavour, Churchill), but his political genius is unmatched.
Surely you can find plenty of information about his life and achievements, and I have no pretension at all to add new “discoveries” to this set of well-known dates and facts that Wikipedia or anything alike fully satisfies.
The aim of this page is different; I will trace the life of Bismarck through personal correspondence that he himself wrote to his family and friends, or using diaries and notes where his colleagues wrote their impressions about the iron chancellor.
The parents of the iron chancellor
The parents of the iron chancellor
The father of Otto was Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck (1771-1845), who married Otto’s mother, Wilhelmine Louise Mencken (1789-1839) on 6 July 1806 (Engelberg, i. 61.).
Karl can be described as the typical Prussian country squire, the least educated of four brothers, decent and sometimes eccentric; a pure “junker”, even though not at the highest peaks of Prussian aristocracy. Like every junker, he treated his estate like a little kingdom, but perhaps with a much stronger practical engagement compared to the proud aristocratic nonchalance of his social equals; this manorial order he issued on 15 March 1803 is a good example: “I will here once again make known that in future I will hold all strictly accountable to the end that those who do not do their duty or deserve punishment may not excuse themselves by saying they did not know... (Engelberg, i. 102.)”. The image of a poor servant begging pardon promising “he does not know” was too much also for the tolerant squire.
Ferdinand was friendly, nice with everybody, but nevertheless a little too simple and incompetent, and this greatly embarrassed his brilliant, quick-minded son.
But let Otto speak:
“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.” (Bismarck to Johanna, 23 Feb. 1847, GW xiv. 67.)
This letter was written in February of 1847 to Johanna von Puttkamer, Otto’s future wife, to whom he recently got engaged. What I can read between the lines is the struggle between the tender affection for a kind, gentle paternal figure and the uncontrollable repulsion for a personality he felt to be weaker than his own. This is a quite rare account of his personal relationships, and it does not surprise me that it comes in of the most literally boring periods in Bismarck’s life (not yet fully involved into politics, retired in his estate spending his time waiting for better days to come).
What about the mother of the golden boy? She came from a very distant world than that of the father, the eccentric country squire; in short, her family was much richer. Her father, Royal Cabinet Councilor Anastasius Ludwig Mencken (1752-1801), was a brilliant, educated diplomat who rose by sheer ability to the level of cabinet secretary in 1782 under Frederick the Great at the age of 30. He continued his career under Frederick William II, married a widowed very wealthy widow, and become the most important of the Cabinet Councillors. Due to an early “mass media” scandal (a publication where he was suspected of being a Jacobin, a supporter of the French revolution, at that time worst than a communist in the US), he was dismissed by the king. A series of political intrigues (fueled by Friedrich Getz, Metternich closer advisor) and the death of the old King turned his fortune around. Under the new king, Friederick William III, he was named to the top civil administrative post. To good to be true, because he died in a few months: he fell ill at 46, and died on 5 August 1801, almost 50 years old.
These events surely shaped the personality of Otto’s mother. As every child who loses a parent at an early age, she probably mourned her brilliant father the rest of her life, and looked at her son to take his place. This letter she wrote to Otto’s older brother, Bernhard, speaks for itself:
“I imagined that my greatest good fortune would be to have a grown son, who, educated under my very eyes, would agree with me, but as a man would be called to penetrate deeper into the world of the intellect than I as a woman could do. I rejoiced in the thought of the intellectual exchange, the mutual encouragement for mental and spiritual engagement, and of that satisfying feeling to have such pleasures with a person who would be through the bonds of nature nearest to my heart, and who, still more, through the kinship of the spirit, would draw ever closer to me. The time for these hopes to be fulfilled has arrived but they have disappeared and unfortunately, I must confess, for ever.” (Engelberg, i. 100.)
What a nice letter to receive from your mother… Wilhelmine was for Otto an oppressive, exigent, cold, strict, figure; Otto hated her and blamed her for some of his misfortunes, which we shall analyse later.
The personality of an individual is in my view the combination of three factors: the personality of the father, the personality of the mother, and the context where he grows up. We have analysed the first two; the interaction between an eccentric, weak paternal figure (but again, a true junker), and a strict, smart but cold mother are, in my opinion, to be blamed for Otto’s almost pathological need to impose himself in a very manly way on the others and for his constant search for a safe foyer where to recover whenever things would not get the way he planned.
NB: all non-referenced information comes from Steinberg, J (2011). “Bismarck – a life”. Oxford University Press Inc., New York.
