In the years 1871–1890, Bismarck dominated Europe, as Angela Merkel does now. But she lacks one outstanding feature of Bismarck’s character – the capacity to hate.
There were eight years left to him after the ambitious young Kaiser Wilhelm II fired him in 1890 in order to be his own Bismarck. As the creator of a united Germany, he was a legendary, hugely popular figure who openly despised the man who fired him and, in his retirement on his estate Friedrichsruh near Hamburg, used his connections with the press to cause him as much harm as possible.
Bismarck narrowly escaped a visit from the Kaiser on his deathbed – by dying before the Kaiser could come – but on one occasion could not prevent an imperial demand to come to dinner, at a few hours notice. The Kaiser, always eager to present an image of treating the great man with deep respect, arrived with a large retinue. A banquet for eighteen was duly served: several courses and innumerable bottles of champagne and cognac. Bismarck, in a wheelchair, barely managed to refrain from poisoning him.
In 1914, Bismarck would have been ninety-nine. No one will ever know if he could have prevented the disaster if he had been able to serve as chancellor for another twenty years. But one can say that the Germany he had created in 1871 was a militarist autocracy. He always wore a uniform when addressing the Reichstag. Without Bismarck, Germany could have become a parliamentary democracy run by non-hating, peace-loving politicians like Angela Merkel.
You should read the biography of the Kaiserin Friedrich, mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II and daughter of Queen Victoria. She hated Bismarck and presumably everything would have been different if Kaiser Friedrich, father of Kaiser Wilhelm had survived. No WWI, maybe even a democratic Germany. Maybe so much power was in the hands of the military that this would not have so, but that is what I have been dreaming about.
Speaking of Bismarck and Merkel, last Sunday’s New York Times has an excellent piece by Timothy Garton Ash about why Euirope should get its act together.
Except:
“The remedy lies in Europe’s own hands. Were it to move beyond the resolution of the euro zone crisis into a closer fiscal and political union, then onto a genuinely common foreign policy, China would take it more seriously, as would America and Russia.
“And Europeans should not entirely abandon the hope — faint though it looks today — that their pioneering version of peaceful integration between previously warring states could point the way for better “global governance” in response to shared threats like climate change and to the tensions that inevitably arise between rising and declining powers. For without enhanced cooperation on a global scale, the 21st-century world may come to look like the late-19th-century Europe of rivalrous great powers, writ large. At best, Europe could become not just another giant; it could offer the example of a new kind of cooperative multinational giant.”
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/can-europe-survive-the-rise-of-the-rest.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss