Bismarck: Master Statesman — A Book Review by Henry Kissinger

It would be hard to think of anybody better qualified to review a book about Bismarck than Kissinger. Both were conservative practitioners of Realpolitik, fact-based, hard-nosed policies unclouded by sentiment. Both, before their retirement, were highly creative characters who – in Kissinger’s case only in matters of foreign policy – broke vitally important new ground, and both made their masters willingly follow them.

The New York Times Book Review deserves credit for persuading Kissinger to review a new work about Bismarck by Jonathan Steinberg, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, for their issue of last Sunday, April 3. Kissinger called it the best book in English about Bismarck.

Steinberg describes Bismarck’s achievement, within nine years after becoming Ministerpräsident of Prussia in 1862, of uniting Germany, as “the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.” Kissinger calls him “a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity.” Bismarck was the embodiment of German militarism. He never appeared in the Reichstag without a uniform, though he had not served in the military. But he had a remarkable understanding of the limits of power. In fact, the military regarded him with suspicion. They did not like his “excessive moderation.”

Critics of Kissinger looking for confirmation of their view that his Realpolitik – as shown in the bombing of Cambodia and the removal of Allende in Chile – was, unlike Bismarck’s, the opposite of moderate might find it in two places in the review.

To achieve the unification of Germany, Bismarck initiated three wars, the third one, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, a very bloody one. There was no suggestion of criticism in Kissinger’s review that these cases of unprovoked aggression were, to put it mildly, morally dubious, and no speculation that the unification of Germany might have been achieved peacefully through a strategy in tune with Germany’s liberal, democratic aspirations, in the spirit of the historic gathering in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in 1848. Such an enterprise would have been incompatible with Bismarck’s – and Kissinger’s – personalities and concepts. (Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis was about Metternich, the Austrian statesman identified with the suppression of liberalism in the post-Napoleonic period.)

Secondly, Kissinger writes that Bismarck’s military campaigns had limited objectives and were designed to co-opt, rather than to humiliate, his adversaries. This was hardly true in the case of the peace terminating the Franco-Prussian war. It ended in the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the imposition of reparations slightly heavier, relatively speaking, than those demanded from Germany in 1919. (See Margaret Macmillan’s Paris 1919, page 496.) The urge for revenge engendered by the penalties inflicted by a triumphant Prussia was certainly one of the factors leading to 1914. The humiliation was made worse by the fact that the ceremony celebrating the unification of Germany took place in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

Kissinger is excellent in his analysis of the reasons why the seeds of the disasters to come were unwittingly sown by Bismarck. After him, whose unique understanding of the nuances of power and its limitations was not likely to be equaled by his successors, a slow slithering into WWI. Even he, during his later years, had difficulties managing the arrangements he had made with his neighbours.

It was beyond Bismarck’s capacity to imagine a world without him. Men like de Gaulle and Churchill were haunted by visions of what was to happen after they had departed, but not Bismarck. In his final eight post-retirement years, he spent much of his time vindictively making life difficult for the over-confident and under-endowed young Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had peremptorily fired him in 1890.

Dropping the Pilot (Punch) became one of the most famous cartoons in history.